1

The Value of Marx: Free Labour, Rent and ‘Primitive’ Accumulation in

Facebook

Steffen Böhm – University of Essex (steffen@essex.ac.uk)

Chris Land – University of Essex (cland@essex.ac.uk)

Armin Beverungen – Leuphana University Lüneburg (armin.beverungen@googlemail.com)

Working paper – University of Essex – May 2012

Abstract

This paper argues that critical studies of organization need to extend their analysis of labour beyond

the sphere of value production organized by capital in order to fully apprehend the realities of

today’s political economy. One direction in which this analysis must be developed is to radically

expand our understanding of ‘labour’ to incorporate the full range of value producing activities,

including productive consumption (also called ‘prosumption’) and ‘free labour’. The second

direction, which is more theoretically neglected, is to recognize that some contemporary business

models do not depend much upon value production at all, but rather on the appropriation of value

through the extraction of rents. In this paper we develop this analysis of ‘profit becoming rent’ by

returning to Marx’s conception of ‘primitive accumulation’, both to highlight the continued

significance of enclosure and appropriation in the global circuits of the extractive industries and

manufacturing, but also to demonstrate that this logic is at work even in the most advanced socio-

economic formations, for example in the basic business model of Facebook.

2

The Value of Marx: Free Labour, Rent and ‘Primitive’ Accumulation in

Facebook

Introduction

There is a spectre haunting organization - the spectre of Marx. All the powers of old organization

seem to have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spirit: new economy gurus, critical

management scholars and defenders of the neo-institutionalist orthodoxy. First and foremost in this

exorcism is the assertion that Marx is out of touch or somehow not relevant today (Shaw 2009).

Through no fault of his own, the old-boy had the misfortune to die in the 1880s, before even Taylor

and Ford had worked their magic and developed the US version of management theory that today is

the starting point for most first year undergraduate modules in organizational behaviour and

management. Since Taylor and Ford we have had the revolution of the human relations movement,

the development of socio-technical systems, institutional theory, organizational development and

even post-colonialism, actor-network theory, corporate social responsibility and population ecology.

While some of these schools of thought regularly refer to Marxist thought, it seems as if Marx has

been almost written out of organization studies. Even labour process theory and critical

management studies, which would appear at first glance to have the closest affinity to Marxist

theorizing, rarely return to his work directly (Hassard et al., 2001), focusing instead on new

developments in organizational theory and practice: for example, understanding aesthetic labour

(Warhurst and Nickson, 2007), the role of subjectivity in workplace discipline (O’Doherty and

Willmott, 2001), or sexuality and deviance as modes of organizational resistance (Collinson, 1992).

While important and relevant, such organizational scholarship could be labeled as a kind of, what

Freeman (2010) calls, ‘Marxism without Marx’.

In line with the theme of this special issue, this paper asks what the relevance of Marx’s thought

might be for the analysis of contemporary work, and how his oeuvre can be directly related to

today’s modes of organizing. Thankfully, we are not alone in asking such questions. Recently, there

has been renewed interest in Marx and explicitly Marxist categories of the analysis of work and

organization (Adler, 2007, 2009, 2011; Carey, 2009; Delbridge, 2007; Thompson, 2007; Vidal,

2011). In asking what the ‘value’ of Marx might be today, we explore his theory of value (see also

Le Ber and Branzei, 2010; Prichard and Mir, 2010) and critique of political economy as it applies to

the business model, and forms of work, associated with one of the most archetypical businesses of,

what can be called, post-fordism (Vidal, 2011): Facebook.

The paper uses three main concepts from Marx to analyze Facebook: labour, primitive

accumulation, and rent. In the first part of the paper we explain these three concepts as they were

developed in Capital (Marx, 1976, 1981), particularly Volumes One (labour and primitive

accumulation) and Three (rent). In the second part of the paper we apply these concepts sequentially

to an analysis of Facebook. Following Christian Fuchs’ (2011a,b,c, 2012) analysis of Google and

other Internet companies through the audience/commodity lens of Dallas Smythe (1981), Facebook

is analyzed as a product of ‘free labour’ (Terranova, 2004) in which ‘prosumers’ use, or consume,

the social networking site Facebook to communicate and develop their social networks, and

simultaneously create Facebook’s main product: user data and audience attention. This data and

audience commodity is then packaged and sold by Facebook to its customers: advertisers and

market researchers. This analysis leaves us with a number of questions, most notably, if labour is

unpaid and therefore itself unvalued, can it be understood as creating value within a Marxist labour

theory of value? How is it that some people have the spare time to labour like this in their leisure

time and what are the technologies that are used in this work? And, finally, how is this free labour

controlled and directed through Facebook’s website?

3

These questions are addressed through the second conceptual resource that we take from Marx:

primitive accumulation. Although Marx himself understood primitive accumulation as an element

of the pre-history of capitalism proper, we follow the analysis of Massimo De Angelis (2007) and

David Harvey (1999; 2003) who have both pointed to the ongoing nature of primitive accumulation,

or accumulation by dispossession. Our primary concern in this section is to understand the broader

global value chains (Levy, 2008) of which Facebook is a part. First and foremost, the immaterial

labour of Facebook ‘prosumers’ (Fuchs, 2012) is possible only because they have both the spare

time to use the site and the technology to access them. Both leisure time and cheap technology are

the product of a global division of labour in which ‘rare earth’ minerals like Coltan are appropriated

through warfare and forced labour (Shukin, 2006; Montague, 2002); in which portable laptops,

tablet computers and smartphones are manufactured in sweatshops where the pay and conditions are

such that dormitory windows must be barred to prevent workers from committing suicide (Business

Week, 2010); and in which workers, or even the formally unemployed in the affluent West, have

access to such resources and the time to play with them (Fuchs, 2012).

Even this only explains half of the story however. To complete the picture we need a second line on

primitive accumulation in which the ‘terroir’ of cyberspace, and the commons on which it is based,

itself becomes subject to new rounds of enclosure, privatization and appropriation. Here we

understand the logic of primitive accumulation applied through proprietorial control over the

protocols and virtual spaces of computer mediated communication. By creating a branded,

proprietary platform, and ensuring that social communication flows through it, Facebook is able to

ensure that anyone wanting to communicate with their peers has to do so via their website. An

artificial scarcity is produced which, much like the scarcity of natural resources referred to above,

allows for the extraction of rent (Hardt and Negri, 2009; Vercellone, 2010; Marazzi, 2010). This

takes us to our third concept from Marx: rent. In controlling social networking sites, companies like

Facebook are able to charge a rent for access. This is not a direct rent, as Žižek (2009) has

suggested is leveraged in Microsoft’s business model, because Facebook is free to use. Rather, the

rent is extracted as a tithe of, what Terranova (2004) calls, ‘free labour’ so that, whilst consuming

(freely) on Facebook, the user is simultaneously working (freely) for Facebook, producing

themselves and their friends as audience and producing data that Facebook can commodify and sell.

This labour is extracted as a rent, rather than through surplus labour conducted in the ‘hidden abode

of production’ in the employment relationship (Marx, 1976; Böhm and Land, 2012), which suggests

a departure from Marx’s analysis of the industrial capitalist control of labour, even if labour remains

the sole source of value within this analysis. The process, described as the ‘becoming-rent of profit’

(Marazzi, 2010; Vercellone, 2010) here becomes apparent: Facebook does not reap a profit merely

from organizing the paid labour of its relatively few employees (as labour process theory would

suggest), but extracts a rent from the commons produced by the free labour of its users.

Part I: Marx on Labour, Value, Profit and Rent

a) Labour Theory of Value

For Marx, labour is the source of all value. The secret of surplus value and the mysterious

transformation M-C-M’ (Marx’s algebra for capitalist profit generation where Money is turned into

Commodities simply for the reason of producing more Money, or M’) lay in the ‘hidden abode of

production’ (Marx, 1976: 279; Read, 2001; see also Mohun, 2004) where the labour process took

place. Much of the first volume of Capital (Marx, 1976) is dedicated to explaining how the

capitalist extracts surplus labour, and thereby surplus value, from his employees. Marx first

discusses the basic process of appropriation of surplus that occurs when a particular labour process

is brought within a factory and placed under the control of an employer but without changing the

content of the labour process itself. This ‘formal subsumption’ (1976: 1021) has its limits, however,

4

as the employer is constrained by having only two main methods for increasing the production of

surplus value:

First… the capitalist takes good care that the work is done in a proper manner, and the means

of production are applied directly to the purpose, so that the raw material is not wasted, and

the instruments of labour are spared, i.e. only worn to the extent necessitated by their use in

the work. (Marx, 1976: 291)

The second method is for the capitalist to extend the length of the working day and ensure that

fewer breaks are taken, thereby increasing what Marx refers to as ‘absolute surplus value’ (1976:

432). Historically, however, struggle, contestation and eventually legislation over the length of the

working day, as well as the need for employees to ultimately consume the products of their labour

in order to complete the circuit M-C-M’ and ensure the flow of wages back into the capitalists’

pockets (Žižek, 2009: 123), placed effective limits on the lengthening of the working day.

Given the limits to increasing surplus value through ‘formal subsumption’, Marx recognizes that the

moment of ‘real subsumption’ of labour under capital comes when the employer not only

appropriates a given labour process but modifies that process expressly for the purpose of

maximizing the production of surplus value. In Volume One (Marx, 1976) this is explored through

the chapters on ‘the division of labour and manufacture’ and ‘machinery and large scale industry’.

Both the division of labour and the use of machinery enable the employer to increase ‘relative

surplus value’ by simultaneously increasing the intensity of work and the productivity of labour

power, and reducing the value of the commodities that determine the value of labour power (Marx,

1976: 423).

In developing his labour theory of value, Marx was not proposing a new theory, but was developing

the extant political economy of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, amongst others, to analyze the

specifically industrial capitalist mode of production. Within the social relations of capitalist

employment, labour is conducted to produce commodities for others, and is then remunerated at its

real value. For Marx, and his predecessors, the value of labour is determined by the value of the

goods required, in a particular social and cultural context, to reproduce the labourer and return them

ready to work in the morning: at a minimum this would be basic food and shelter, but in more

advanced economies would need to be adequate to ensure training, development and active

engagement with the production process (Braverman, 1974; Burawoy,1982). As Marx and many

labour process theorists have taught us, the ability to produce surplus value results from an

underlying indeterminacy in the labour process: whilst the value of labour power is determined by

the cost of reproducing it, the amount of value that labour power can actually produce depends upon

the length of time, and intensity at which it is deployed in working for an employer. If,

hypothetically, an individual labourer can produce goods adequate to the value of their labour

power in half a working day, then for the other half of their time they are working gratis for their

employer, i.e. they are producing value for the owner of their business but without receiving

additional compensation for this surplus labour.

Much of Volume One of Capital (Marx, 1976) is devoted to the details of how the potential to

labour - labour power - is converted into actual labour and how the value of labour itself is affected

by changes in the social average productivity levels in a given society, the state of development of

technology, and the price of the commodities that determine the value of labour power. Much of

this analysis has informed the Labour Process Theory perspective on work and organization, which

has itself devoted considerable attention to the indeterminacy of labour, the changing nature of

control over labour, and the relationship between value and labour (e.g. Carey, 2009; Thompson,

1989; Jaros, 2004, 2005; Jacques, 2000; O’Doherty and Willmott, 2001, 2009; Vidal, 2011). What

5

has received less attention within organization studies, however, is the socio-historical process

through which the capitalist employment relationship itself emerged.

b) Primitive Accumulation

In the final part of Volume One of Capital, Marx (1976) returns to the pre-history of capitalism and

introduces the term ‘so-called primitive accumulation’, which ‘is nothing else than the historical

process of divorcing the producer from the means of production’ (Marx, 1976: 875). He does this

because, having spent the previous 800+ pages describing the production of value within capitalism,

he still needs to explain how the pre-conditions for capitalism emerged: ie. two classes of people,

one owning the means of production and the other owning nothing but their labour power. Marx

rejects the theological tale of original sin, which places the onus for poverty squarely on the

shoulders of the poor, or at least their ancestors. Instead, he suggests that the separation of society

into two distinct economic classes was the result of a two-fold process that systematically

dispossessed one group of people from access to the land and therefore independent means of

subsistence. At the same time, it placed another class in possession of that land and a mass of

wealth that could be deployed as capital to employ the dispossessed. This was not the result of

frugality, but of a global system of genocide, slavery and expropriation:

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in

mines of the indigenous population of that continent, the beginnings of the conquest and

plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of

blackskins, are all things which characterize the dawn of the era of capitalist production.

These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation. (Marx, 1976:

915)

For Marx, this is a moment in the pre-history of capitalism and, once achieved, he sees the inherent

logic of the capitalist circuits of value reproducing and even intensifying these divisions so that

inequality and poverty can be achieved through rational production and the circulation of

commodities at their values.

Against this developmental logic several commentators have suggested that ‘so-called primitive

accumulation’ is in fact an ongoing process that remains at the heart of capitalist accumulation. De

Angelis (2006) points out that there are no distinct and linear stages or transitional paths that

countries can take towards the desired goal of full capitalist development. In his view, primitive

accumulation sits side by side with more advanced knowledge production. In a more traditional

Marxist lexicon, we might suggest that development in advanced knowledge economies is

dependent upon underdevelopment in other economies, which are placed in a position of economic

servitude, producing raw materials, working on disposal of waste, or in low value-added

manufacturing positions within global supply chains (Furtado, 1967; Cairns, 2007). In such an

account the knowledge work of consultants and call-centre operatives alike is impossible without

the military enforced expropriation of land in the Niger Delta for oil production, the civil war

around Coltan (a necessary raw material for the production of mobile phones) mining in the Congo,

or GM soya production in Brazil or Argentina. In this aspect, primitive accumulation is a process

that ensures the development of the ‘advanced’ capitalist countries whilst maintaining poverty

through the expropriation of raw materials in the ‘third world’ or ‘developing countries’ (see

Midnight Notes Collective, 1990).

For De Angelis (2006), this is not the whole story however, when he refers to the ‘continuous

character of primitive accumulation’ (2006: 136). Primitive accumulation is also continuous in the

‘advanced’ economies of the Global North. The enclosure of what used to be public goods

6

continues to take place even in the most ‘advanced’ economies. We could name here the

privatization of what used to be public services; for example, transport, health and education (e.g.

Strangleman, 2004). We could also mention the newly created carbon trading mechanisms, which

aim to establish new markets to exploit a completely new commodity: pollution. Carbon is a new

commodity, secured by enclosure, which sits alongside the knowledge economy (Böhm and Dabhi,

2009). One enclosure that has received much popular media as well as critical academic attention

has been that of the ‘knowledge commons’ (De Angelis, 2006: 149) whereby the relatively

autonomous reproduction of cultural and technical knowledge is subordinated to the capitalist

imperative of privatization and accumulation through copyright legislation, corporate control over

cultural reproduction through Digital Rights Management, corporate sponsorship of research and

education, and through newly established forms of intellectual property rights (Munro, 2007; Noble,

2003; Perelman, 2000). Hardt (2010) suggests that we distinguish between the natural and the

cultural commons: as much as the natural commons are exploited e.g. through the oil industry, the

cultural commons are exploited e.g. via the patenting of medicinal practices.

Although organizational scholars are starting to examine such processes in relation to international

business strategies and comparative analyses of capitalism (Lane and Probert, 2009), the basic

process of enclosure and privatization of land, and the economic processes by which such is

capitalized, suggest a third concept that Marx dealt with extensively in his later writings: rent.

c) Rent

In Volume One of Capital, Marx (1976) does not overly trouble himself with profit per se, focusing

most of his analysis on the production of surplus value in general. In Volume Three (Marx, 1981)

he turns to address the question of how this surplus is distributed between the various interested,

propertied parties that represent capital - landowners, financiers and the industrial capitalist proper -

so that surplus value is realized as a range of revenue streams:

the forms of profit on capital (interest on capital as such, and profit of enterprise on capital as

functioning capital), and ground-rent, which falls to the owner of the land which is playing its

part in the production process. (Marx, 1981: 992)

In relating to the basic trinity of the factors of production - capital, land, and labour - Marx’s labour

theory of value makes it absolutely clear that only labour can produce value. Capital is nothing but

dead labour so that capital can, strictly speaking, create no value, only provide the necessary

resources for labour to produce at the socially average level, or pass the value embedded in raw

materials and tools, on to a new commodity. Any augmentation or addition of new value is down to

living labour and living labour alone:

By turning his money into commodities that serve as the building materials for a new product,

and as factors in the labour process, by incorporating living labour into their lifeless

objectivity, the capitalist simultaneously transforms value, i.e. past labour in its objectified and

lifeless form, into capital, value which can perform its own valorization process, an animated

monster which begins to ‘work’, ‘as if its body were by love possessed’. (Marx, 1976: 302)

This same analysis applies to land. Land as a factor of production is essentially unproductive on its

own. It requires the application of labour to render land productive, by farming it, mining it, or

building on it. Of course, some lands may be more amenable to exploitation than others. An alluvial

plain is more fertile than a desert. A desert with a large oil reserve beneath it can provide more

energy than a bog. An apartment in a gentrified part of London can command a higher rent than one

in a ‘rough’ area where the bohemians and artists have yet to move (Harvey, 2001). Rent is taken

7

from the net surplus value produced by a capitalist through that land, whether they are a developer,

miner, or capitalist farmer. Harvey (2001) suggests that in the age of neoliberal globalization

differentials in the value of landed property are declining, so that today culture becomes

increasingly important in increasing the potential rent to be extracted from land, as he demonstrates

with the case of Barcelona.

Whilst Marx’s analysis is not a general theory of rent (Fine and Saad-Filho, 2004: 154), recent

commentators have taken up this idea of rent to analyze the profit model in post-Fordist production

(Žižek, 2004; Hardt and Negri, 2009; Vercellone, 2010; Marazzi, 2010). The crucial difference for

Marx between rent and profit was that profit was productively reinvested in production. Whilst

capital could not directly produce value, it could render labour more productive by increasing the

organic composition of capital and - through the real subsumption of labour - by reorganizing

labour to be more efficiently deployed. Without rehearsing the various debates over the necessity

and productivity of managerial labour (see Armstrong, 1991), the suggestion in Vercellone’s (2010)

analysis is that the owners of capital are increasingly distant from, and do not intervene in, the

organization of production. As profit becomes more like rent, it takes on a directly parasitic form,

no longer concerned with the management and organization of production and superintendence of

labour. Rather, in Vercellone’s (2010) reading of Volume Three (Marx, 1981), capitalist profits

increasingly come to resemble rents as it seeks to extract profits from outside the production

process, rather than through an entrepreneurial organization or management:

capitalist rent can be seen as a pure relation of distribution because it no longer has any

“function, or at least any normal function in the process of production.” Therefore, rent presents

itself as a credit title or a right to the ownership of some material and immaterial resource that

grants a right to drawing value from a position of exteriority in respect to production.

(Vercellone, 2010: 95-96)

For Vercellone (2010), under post-Fordist conditions of production, in which knowledge and ICT

have meant that more and more labour is intellectual in nature and concerned with the self-

organization of productive capabilities and social relations (MacKenzie, 2001; Lazzarato, 1996;

Hardt and Negri, 2000), capitalist profit has had to enclose new commodities, following the model

of land, in order to create an artificial scarcity (Vercellone, 2010: 91). The example of Intellectual

Property Rights is perhaps the clearest example of this. Whilst Ross (2009) shows how this logic is

at work in the global market for higher education, drug patents are another example. Patents on new

medicines seek to create artificial scarcity and prevent generic drugs being reverse engineered from

proprietary drugs. The effect of this is to ensure a period of monopoly in which prices can be kept

inflated above the value they would otherwise fall to in conditions of open competition. This

secures profit not by manufacturing the drugs more efficiently and cheaply but by extracting a rent

on the IPR generated by research and development.

Part II: Marx in the Age of Facebook

‘Facebook, the social-networking site that is one of the most closely-watched private

companies in the world, is likely to go public by the first quarter of 2012, say people familiar

with the matter, at a valuation that could be pegged at north of $100 billion.’ (CNBC, 2012)

As Facebook prepares for one of the biggest IPOs (initial public offering, i.e. selling company

stocks to investors through a stock exchange) in history, the question is how such an immense

valuation (see CNBC report above) is possible with a mere 2000 or so employees on its books. One

obvious answer is that it is not just the number of employees that create value for Facebook, but the

number of its active users, currently estimated to be around 800 million worldwide, who share

8

millions of posts, photos, videos and other content through the Facebook ‘ecosystem’ on a daily

basis worldwide. This is ‘free labour’, as Terranova (2004) has called it: work that is both free from

the obligations, constraints and managerial imperatives of formal employment, and work that is

done for free and without financial recompense. But it is also ‘labour’ in the sense that it creates

value for Facebook. In browsing others’ pages, and commenting on their updates, or posting

pictures, YouTube clips, Spotify songs, or witty updates on your own page, as a user of Facebook

one is producing an audience for the highly targeted advertising that generates their income.

In this second part of the paper we aim to understand Facebook’s value production processes

through the three Marxist concepts introduced above: labour, primitive accumulation, and rent.

Given that most labour occurring at Facebook is unpaid, involving knowledge and communication

processes, some organization theorists would not consider using a Marxist approach to

understanding the labour processes of this media company (e.g. Jacques, 2000). We argue,

however, that it is imperative for critical management and organizational scholars to understand

such value producing practices – whether paid or unpaid – as a form of labour. In this we suggest

that to fully apprehend, and critique, the contemporary formation of value production in social

networks and the new media, we need to deploy an expanded understanding of labour as

encompassing any value producing activity, regardless of how that value is valorized and circulated.

As we have argued elsewhere (Böhm and Land, 2012), when faced with changes like Facebook or

‘the new economy’, studies of work and organization should not be proclaiming the end of the

industrial capitalist system of value production through labour, but revisiting Marx’s (1976) labour

theory of value to develop an expanded conception of the ‘hidden abode of production’.

a) Facebook’s ‘Free’ Labour

In a series of papers on the political economy of the Internet and web 2.0, Christian Fuchs

(2011a,b,c, 2012) uses Dallas Smythe’s (1981) audience commodity model to understand the

accumulation process of companies such as Google and Facebook. For Fuchs (2012), these web 2.0

companies make their money in pretty much the same way as more ‘traditional’ media companies,

such as those working in TV and newspapers, whose main commodity is not so much the

programming content that is produced but the audience that is filtered, packaged and sold to

advertisers. There is a long history of writers analyzing the political economy of the creative and

cultural industries, which often depend on the production of audiences (for an overview, see

Hesmondalgh, 2007; O’Connor, 2010). While Smythe (1981) shows how, what he calls, the

‘audience commodity’ is produced, Herman and Chomsky’s (2002) ‘propaganda model’ explains

how the advertising model is a powerful filter that determines what kind of content is allowed to be

broadcast through, say TV or radio platforms.

While TV and radio mass broadcasting platforms are only able to produce very broad audience

commodities whose profiles and characteristics can then be sold to advertisers, Facebook is able to

target specific user groups much more effectively. This is done through powerful computing

algorithms that filter user data according to a range of different advertising oriented criteria. As

Fuchs (2012) shows, given Facebook’s relatively lax handling of its users’ privacy, the company is

able to access a vast amount of personal data that is recorded as Facebook users and their ‘friends’

navigate through their website. While Facebook, when it started in 2005, did not carry any

advertisement, it has now accumulated vast amounts of data – stored in some of the world’s biggest

data centres – which it has recently decided to monetize. Compared to traditional media companies,

‘the efficiency of advertising [through Facebook] is increased, more advertisements that are likely

to fit the interests of consumers are shown in the same time period as before’ (Fuchs, 2012: 9). This

is why many advertisers are now redirecting their ads to online platforms, such as Google and

9

Facebook, because they can target very specific audiences and control their advertising behaviour

more effectively.

At the heart of Facebook’s ability to create thousands of targeted audience commodities are hence

two things: on the one hand, its data management capabilities, based on, what Fuchs (2012) calls,

the surveillance of its users, generating vast amounts of data; and, on the other hand, its 800+

million users worldwide continuously creating content for free. The latter is the key difference to

the TV and radio platforms. It is Facebook’s users who create the data themselves. That is, through

forms of, what Terranova calls, ‘free labour’ (e.g. uploading pictures, writing messages or emails),

Facebook users, or what Fuchs (2012) calls ‘prosumers’, create vast amounts of content.

Facebook currently employs about 2000 workers who make a living by getting a wage in exchange

of the hours they spent labouring for the company. We would argue, however, that the employees of

Facebook are effectively acting as managers, given that they do not actually produce any content

themselves. The vast majority of Facebook’s content and data is produced by its users who give

away their labour for free in exchange for the use value produced by the Facebook platform.

Facebook’s employee-managers are then packaging this data in such a way that it can be sold as

audience commodity to advertisers. This describes the competitive advantage Facebook has over

more traditional media companies, which, for example maintain TV and radio platforms. Through

the free labour model, Facebook does not need to pay for any content itself, while TV and radio

companies have to invest significant sums into programming, star presenters and expensive

equipment. Hence, Facebook has an immense cost advantage over more traditional media

companies. That is, Facebook is able to produce superior surplus value rates because of the ‘free

labour’ that is expended by the 800+ million users. This superiority is reflected in the vast valuation

of Facebook in its IPO. What stock investors value in the company is its vast potential to produce

higher than average surplus value rates through the intensive and extensive exploitation of the data

freely produced by its users.

This, however, only provides one side of the story of how Facebook’s value is produced. Another

side starts with the realization that Facebook users are able to sometimes spend hours chatting to

friends, sharing pictures with them, etc. only because they are enjoying a higher socially average

wage compared to those labourers - often situated in the Global South - who are exploited while

producing the very ‘gadgets’ that are needed to keep the creative Facebook economy going - not to

think of the technology waste that is created in the process (Lipman, 2002). Let us now explore

these global dynamics in more detail.

b) Facebook’s ‘Primitive’ Accumulation

As we have discussed above, enclosure, privatization and appropriation, the essential processes of

primitive accumulation, are dependent first and foremost on a symbolic act in which something is

incorporeally transformed into a commodity that can, or even must, be owned. Perhaps still the best

example of this is Polanyi’s suggestion in The Great Transformation that the greatest

transformation in the history of humanity is when land is conceptualized as a ‘thing’ distinct from

lived human experience: ‘To isolate [land] and form a market for it was perhaps the weirdest of all

the undertakings of our ancestors’ (Polanyi, 2001: 187, cited in Sullivan, 2010: 111). ‘Weird’ it may

be but such a conceptual transformation is a necessary condition for enclosure and privatization,

and, as we have seen, for the creation of the ‘free labourer’. The same applies for any other ‘good’

that can be privatized, from a public service to water, the atmosphere and pollution, genetic code, or

communication and language. De Angelis helps us to understand these transformations through

what he refers to as ‘value practices’:

10

By value practices I mean those actions and processes, as well as correspondent webs of

relations, that are both predicated on a given value system and in turn (re)produce it…To talk

about value practices is simply to highlight the fact that social practice, or social doing, or

social co-production, is grounded on systems of evaluation that select ‘goods’ and ‘bads’ in

which individual singularities act on the basis of these evaluations, and the effects of these

actions are in turn measured within the parameters of this value system and of clashes against

other value practices. (2007: 24)

A crucial element of primitive accumulation is thus the imposition of a specific set of value

practices as hegemonic. Facebook is part of a hegemonic value practice that valorizes creativity,

knowledge and ‘sharing’ through the Internet, part of the wider discourse of the ‘knowledge

economy’ (Böhm and Land, 2009). For De Angelis (2006), contemporary practices such as Digital

Rights Management or Trade Agreements on Intellectual Property are attempts to ‘enclose’ and

ensure private ownership of cultural products, creativity and knowledge. While these are really

cultural commons that are produced by the ‘general intellect’ (Hard and Negri, 2000), they are

either enclosed as private property, as in the many examples of autonomous, community-based or

publicly funded forms of ‘user-innovation’ documented by Eric von Hippel (2005), or are managed

so that access to these commons is only possible using a privately owned infrastructure such as

Facebook, or of the ‘autonomous’ production of brand communities discussed by Arvidsson (2006;

see also Land, 2010).

What such studies of knowledge labour neglect - and also Fuchs’ analysis of Facebook - are the

broader networks of relations that produce the material commodities that remain the material

bearers of such immaterial value. It is perhaps no coincidence that the last 10 years have seen high-

technology, brand and ICT based organizations dropping out of the FTSE 100 to be replaced by

companies from the traditional extractive industries like mining, oil and gas, which now account for

about a third of the index’s overall valuation (FT 2011). The world of finance, which dominates the

global value practices of contemporary capitalist, seems to say that there have been many more

opportunities for profit making in the traditional industries than in the ‘new’ knowledge industries.

This, however, stands in stark contrast with what could be regarded as the hegemonic discourse of

the importance of the knowledge sectors of the ‘new economy’, such as management consulting,

advertising, the arts and other aspects of the cultural industries (Böhm and Land, 2009).

Attention to the material production that often underpins the ‘knowledge economy’ brings our

analytical focus back to the kinds of primitive accumulation that Marx discusses in Capital, and that

Wallerstein (1974) took up in world systems theory, where those nations on the periphery of the

world system of capitalist value production have their raw materials exploited to feed development

at the centre (see also Munck, 2002). The example of Coltan mining is exemplary here (Shukin,

2006; Montague, 2002). Coltan is an essential mineral for the production of Tantalum, a metal that

is indispensable in the manufacture of mobile telephones and wireless laptop computers that are

needed to access the Facebook platform. The largest reserves of Coltan are found today in the

Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) where a bloody civil war has been fought over the political

control of the country, and the control of the lucrative Coltan mines. Often employing child labour

or dispossessed peasants, these mines are a necessary dialectical part of the articulated value chains

of the knowledge economy, producing both ‘free’ labourers from previously land-bound peasantry,

and an accumulation of wealth that creates hierarchical inequalities within the DRC, supported by

the militia, and, captured by the hardware manufacturers, produces a double profit for transnational

corporations, which are primarily based in the North and West of the globe. These profits are

double in the sense that they are created first when the hardware that is needed to run Facebook is

purchased and then again when users actually access and spend their spare time on this proprietary,

advertising oriented social networking platform.

11

It may be possible to analyze some of these global value chains, or Global Production Networks

(GPNs) as David Levy (2008) calls them, in terms of the labour theory of value. It might be

possible to consider that a kind of super-exploitation is occurring in the periphery of the global

economy and the surplus thus produced is used to feed the centre, a classical imperial analysis.

However, it is precisely in creating these egregious inequalities that the logic of these GPNs lies and

this is not a logic of value production so much as one of expropriation:

Recent theoretical and empirical work on [Global Commodity Chains and Global Production

Networks] is valuable in illuminating the inequalities that stem from asymmetric power

relations across firms and regions, recasting value chains as systems of value appropriation as

much as creation. (Levy, 2008: 945)

Here then we see a second deployment of De Angelis’ (2007) concept of ‘value practices.’ As Levy

(2008) recognizes in his study of the coffee GPN, the totality of this network includes the

hegemonic discourses of neoliberalism and its value practices just as much as it does the material

practices of the workers on the bean plantations suffering the effects of pesticides and chemical

treatments. The same applies to ‘knowledge work’ or ‘digital labour’, which applies to Facebook.

The design that goes into the latest Apple iPad or the coding that is done for Facebook are linked -

via globally integrated value chains - to China’s exploitative labour practices (see, e.g. the Foxconn

story; Business Week, 2010) and the extractive industries that produce the raw materials without

which the ‘knowledge economy’ could not function (Dyer-Witheford, 2010). It is the structure of

these GPNs to create inequality by valuing the branding work of Nestle or Starbucks over the work

of these labourers and farmers, however ‘fair’ the trade that buys their beans. In this distributed

process of valuation we can see, then, the inversion of Marx’s labour theory of value as a value

theory of labour (Harvey, 1999; Elson, 1979): a model whereby we can see not only how labour

creates value but also how specific forms of labour are valued, and others devalued, by particular

regimes of production.

c) Facebook’s (Monopoly) Rent

For Hardt and Negri (2009), this is not the end of the story however. For them, ‘real subsumption’

is only realized at the point where the biopolitical production of life, sociality, and communication

are entirely subsumed under the capitalist logic and structure the whole chain of value from

production through distribution, exchange and consumption to reproduction (Dyer-Witheford, 1999;

Vercellone, 2007). Here the logic of the factory, and the transformation of activity into labour,

extends to the whole of society so that it becomes a ‘social factory,’ a term that indicates the

extension of the logic of the factory to all social activities but also that society has itself become the

main product of that factory, in the form of productive social-relations (Dyer-Witheford, 1999; Gill

and Pratt, 2008; Hardt and Negri, 1994). Here Autonomist Marxists depart from Marx’s own

political economy. For Marx, under capitalism labour is the sole source of value and therefore of

surplus value. Capital itself is unproductive and so all value is the product of labour. Profit is simply

the extraction of a portion of surplus value for the capitalist as a result of labour performed for the

capitalist, but not paid for by the capitalist.

In one sense we can see the development of this ‘real subsumption’ in Facebook where friendship

and social networks are offered as commodities and where these commodities are produced, though

a kind of unpaid communicative labour, by those participating in the use of the site. We can also see

this logic at work in the kinds of branding that Adam Arvidsson (2006; 2008) has written about in

terms of an ‘ethical economy’. For a brand-based organization, the exchange value of a brand is

dependent upon it having a communicational use-value for consumers: i.e. it must enable them to

perform socialized identity work through their ‘consumption’ of the branded product. For

12

Arvidsson (2006) this consumption is necessarily productive, however, as it reproduces the social

and communicative space within which that brand has a potential use-value, thereby augmenting

brand value. In effect, consumers of branded products are working for the brand owner as their

consumption is productive of brand value, which in turn becomes the new locus of capitalist

accumulation (Marazzi, 2010: 56), as witnessed by the booming interest in questions of brand

equity and valuation (Lury and Moor, 2010).

Our example of Facebook supports Hardt and Negri’s (2009: 142) paradoxical point that, just as

social communication, politics and life are becoming subsumed under capital, so this ‘labour’ is

increasingly autonomous. For Facebook, the value of the site is entirely dependent upon users

creating the content through what Terranova (2004) calls ‘free-labour’: labour that is both ‘free’

because unpaid, but also ‘free’ because it is autonomous and cannot be controlled. Similarly, Martin

Kornberger (2010) has recently argued that the production of brand value is similarly autonomous.

Because the value of a brand is co-produced in consumption, it is necessarily outside the direct

control of the company that owns the brand. This would also be ‘free labour’ in the double sense

that consumption is usually unpaid.

This relative autonomy of the immaterial labour (Lazzarato, 1996) of cultural production,

knowledge work, brand-work and social net-work both extends and unsettles the real subsumption

of labour under capital. On the one hand, it extends the logic so that all forms of social activity,

even communication and friendship, are brought into the circuits of value production. On the other

hand, it breaks with the logic of real subsumption as Marx theorized it. This is because, for Marx,

real subsumption was characterized by the capitalist exercising complete control over the form and

content of the labour process, whilst here we see an apparent liberation of productive activity, to the

extent that its autonomy appears to be structurally necessary to the effective production of value

precisely because so much productive activity lies outside of the formal employment contract. This

appears to change the basic structure of capitalist value production and profit. With Marx’s

understanding of real subsumption grounded in industrializing, mid-nineteenth Century England,

the labour theory of value still made analytical and political sense, even if it was not a particularly

accurate theory of price (Harvey, 1999; Böhm and Land, 2009, 2012). Now, however, Hardt and

Negri (2000) suggest, the labour theory of value has become irrelevant. They argue, if labour is

‘free’ in Terranova’s (2004) double sense, then it cannot stand as an effective measure of value

production.

Žižek (2009) makes this point very clearly in his discussion of Microsoft. There is simply no way

that Microsoft’s model of value production and profitability can be explained in terms of the

productivity of the labour power it deploys. On such grounds it would not be able to compete with

the Open Source movement, which has been producing functionally equivalent software for years

(Linux and Ubuntu operating systems and the Open Office package, for example, which are

produced using free labour and are free to the consumer). Instead, Bill Gates’ business model is

based on creating a form of monopolistic control over the basic infrastructure of the knowledge

economy and doing everything he can to ensure that Microsoft maintain effective control over the

networks and protocols of communication that are used in the communicative circuits of production

in the social factory.

Facebook is the new Microsoft. It has established itself as the de-facto gatekeeper and standard of

the social networking world. This idea of a ‘profit-becoming rent’ shifts the dominant logic of value

production in the heartlands of the so-called advanced capitalist economies. Rather than resulting

from the direct exploitation of labour at the point of production – as the labour theory of value

would posit – value is now appropriated through a form of ‘rent.’ As Hardt and Negri put it:

13

Rather than an organ functioning within the capitalist body, biopolitical labor-power is

becoming more and more autonomous, with capital simply hovering over it parasitically with

its disciplinary regimes, apparatuses of capture, mechanisms of expropriation, financial

networks and the like. (Hardt and Negri, 2009: 142).

It would seem then that Peter Drucker (1992) was at least partly right when he speculated in The

Age of Discontinuity that control over the means of production had fundamentally shifted to

knowledge and that workers might even rent the means of production from owners, rather than

owners directly employing labour. However, he was fundamentally wrong when he extrapolated

from this potential the conclusion that ‘the old concept of “ownership” may no longer be very

relevant’ (1992: 147). On the contrary, it is precisely ownership that enables a rent to be extracted

and profit realized. Hence the constant news stories of battles over intellectual property rights from

Napster and the music industry to Microsoft’s anti-trust case over the bundling of Internet Explorer

with other software or even to Apple’s ongoing court cases over the design of the smartphones of

their competitors, such as Samsung.

This analysis of the production of surplus value through the extraction of rents on (relatively)

autonomous forms of production still leaves the precise nature of accumulation unexamined

(Willmott, 2010), as well as creating problems for the full circuit of capital, because ‘free’ labour

creates no additional capacity for the consumption (by wages) of the surplus it produces, a

significant contradiction in the current regime of value production and accumulation. In answering

this question of what form the new constant capital takes, Marazzi (2010) proposes that it is the

‘visibility and prestige’ of brands:

In this model, the production of profit by companies would take place over and against the

individuation and capture of a ‘lateral’ surplus-value (the sale of publicity, and the sale of data

produced by the activity of users, the capacity to attract financial investments on the basis of

visibility and the prestige of new global brands like Google and Facebook)… The new constant

capital, different from the system of (physical) machines typical of the Fordist age, is

constituted, apart from information technology and information (TIC), by a totality of non-

material organizational systems that suck surplus-value by pursuing citizens in every moment

of their lives, with the result that the working day, the time of living labor, is excessively

lengthened and intensified. (Marazzi, 2010: 55-56)

This analysis resonates with the idea that we are living in an ‘attention economy’ (Beller, 2006;

Davenport and Beck, 2001), whereby the ability to attract attention and structure communication is

the main source of value. People today, particularly young people, are watching less and less

television and spending more and more time on interactively programmed media, such as web 2.0

applications like Facebook, YouTube and other forms of demand-led, streamed media (Kornberger,

2010). In such a context ‘attention’ can no longer be assured in the traditional broadcast media so it

becomes a scarce resource for those wanting to sell. Although being proposed as new, the analysis

here is not that far from Herman and Chomsky’s (2002) analysis of the political economy of the

mass media whereby a traditional newspaper’s real product was a market demographic that they

sold to advertisers. Here the same process happens but with the difference being that the content

that generates this advertising audience (and simultaneously generates a wealth of marketing

information about itself) is produced by the ‘audience’ itself, dispensing with the labour costs (or

‘variable capital’ in the Marxist lexicon) that the traditional print-based media had to bear in the

form of a writing and editing staff.

Crucially, the model for constant capital here is the brand itself. In order for Facebook to function

and continue to generate a surplus of attention, it must maximize the reach and depth of the

communication lines that flow through its websites. It is for this very reason that Facebook

14

constantly encourages its users to upload more and more content, change their profile pictures and

make more of their ‘stuff’ available to the wider public (rather than just to their closest friends).

This is to maximize the exposure not only of the Facebook brand but also the brands that the site

carries in its advertisements.

Conclusions

Facebook is often celebrated today as the archetypical company of the post-Fordist age of web 2.0.

Its extraordinary valuation in its recent IPO suggests that the company, which was only founded in

2005, is the start of a new production of value in an age of ‘informational capitalism’, characterized

by communication, immaterial labour, and knowledge sharing over the Internet. Yet, equally, most

commentators seem to be baffled about exactly how a company, employing a mere 2000 knowledge

workers, can be valued at north of the $100 billion mark.

In this paper we have analyzed Facebook’s value through three concepts, labour, primitive

accumulation, and rent, which we have applied directly through a reading of Marx and Marxist

literatures. By explicitly linking to Marx’s oeuvre, we have attempted to explore the value of Marx

for a critical analysis of contemporary modes of work and organization.

First, we have suggested, through a reading of the work of Fuchs (2011a,b,c, 2012), that Facebook’s

main commodity is not its various online web services, but the vast amount of data its users create

on a continuous basis by chatting, uploading photos and creating web pages. The value of this data

commodity is hence created freely by its 800+ million users worldwide, which the company then

packages and sells to advertisers and market researchers. In this way, Facebook’s business model is

very much in line with that of many other media companies that are dependent on creating and

selling audience commodities (Smythe, 1981). The extraordinary value of Facebook can be

explained by its competitive advantage of being able to gain access to its media content for free. It

is hence the ‘free labour’ (Terranova, 2004) expended on Facebook that creates its high IPO

valuation.

We have argued, however, that this ‘free labour’ analysis of Facebook only provides one side of the

explanation of the company’s value. We have hence, second, argued that the ‘free labour’ analysis

needs to be augmented by a focus on its dialectical Other: what Marx called ‘so-called primitive

accumulation’ (Marx, 1976: 875). This is to realize that Facebook is dependent on a vast network of

value chains (Levy, 2008) of extraction and exploitative labour processes that are typically located

thousands of miles away from the high technology and knowledge sharing world of Facebook. That

is, Facebook chatting and sharing run alongside widespread processes of industrial deskilling and

violent, often militarized, expropriation of the raw materials of production (De Angelis, 2006). As

land is expropriated for mining - producing the raw materials needed to produce the technology

gadgets on which Facebook is running - those previously dependent upon that land for their

subsistence are ‘set free’ to work in capitalist labour markets in the very moment that they are

liberated from any other options but wage labour. To put this in another way, simply focusing on

the labour process of Facebook - thereby accepting the legal/structural boundaries of incorporation -

is not adequate. That is, conceptions of the ‘labour process’ need to be extended through networked

forms to embrace the full range of the commodity chain, from extraction through to social

production and consumption, from mining, police action, property right legislation and warfare

through to branding and consumption. In respect of the latter this must also recognize that the

privileging of the labour process as the main locus of value production embodied in the

employment relationship limits unnecessarily our ability to understand the broader processes of

change within labour (as value productive activity), and within political economy more generally.

15

Whilst this analysis can go some way towards helping us to understand the production and

accumulation of capital in diffuse, but propertied, immaterial systems like branded social

networking sites, it only takes us so far in understanding contemporary systems of accumulation.

We have hence developed a third conceptual image based on Marx’s conception of rent. We have

argued that our example of Facebook’s ‘free labour’ model, which takes place outside of the

employment relationship but nevertheless really does produce value, is accompanied by a new

system of profiteering and accumulation not based in labour and value production, but in the

realization of ‘rents’ based on enclosure and appropriation. We have argued that Facebook is able,

in addition to the surplus value created by its millions of users, to also capture value by its sheer

ability to monopolize social interactions over the Internet. As Microsoft has monopolized PC

computing through its proprietary software platform, Facebook has created an ‘obligatory passage

point’ through which most people wanting to use the Internet need to go. This ‘monopoly’

positioning has nothing to do with its ability to produce surplus value and profit, but must be seen

as an additional frame of analysis. Without recognizing this distinction, critical approaches to

organization studies risk misapprehending the global realities of work today by restricting analysis

to forms of labour taking place within the boundaries of specific organizations or simply focusing

on an expanded conception of labour and the productive consumption, whilst missing the new logic

of ‘profit-becoming rent’.

Overall, it is our argument that critical, Marxist studies of organization today must follow the flows

of labour through production, distribution, exchange and consumption as it crosses and combines

activities within the primary, secondary and tertiary sectors. Such an approach would combine

Marx’s (1976) understanding of ‘primitive accumulation’, as developed by De Angelis (2006) with

autonomist understandings of ‘immaterial labour’ (Hardt and Negri, 2000) by using a form of

commodity chain analysis (Levy, 2008) to appreciate the full range of distributed, interdependent,

forms of labour that constitute contemporary, globalized processes of value production.

References

Adler, P. (2007) ‘The future of critical management studies: A paleo-Marxist view’. Organization

Studies, 28(9): 1313–1345.

Adler, P. (2009) ‘Marx, Socialization and Labour Process Theory: A Rejoinder’, Organization

Studies, 28(9): 1387-1394.

Adler, P. (2011) Marxist philosophy and organization studies: Marxist contributions to the

understanding of some important organizational forms, in H. Tsoukas, R. Chia (eds.)

Philosophy and Organization Theory (Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Volume

32), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, pp.123-153.

Amin, S. (1974) Accumulation on a World Scale. New York, NY: Monthly Review Press.

Armstrong, P. (1991) ‘The divorce of productive and unproductive management’, in C. Smith, D.

Knights, and H. Willmott (eds) White-Collar Work: The Non-Manual Labour Process.

Basingstoke and London: Macmillan.

Arvidsson, A. (2006) Brands: Meaning and Value in Media Culture. Abingdon: Routledge.

Arvidsson, A. (2008) ‘The ethical economy: Towards a post-capitalist theory of value’, Capital &

Class, 97: 13-29.

Banerjee, S.B. (2008a) Necrocapitalism. Organization Studies, 29 (12): 1541-1563.

Banerjee, S.B. (2008b) Corporate social responsibility: The good, the bad and the ugly. Critical

Sociology, 34 (1): 51-79.

Beller, J. (2006) The cinematic mode of production: attention economy and the society of the

spectacle: Interfaces, studies in visual culture. UPNE.

Böhm, S. and Brei, V. (2008) ‘Marketing the Hegemony of Development: Of Pulp Fictions and

Green Deserts’, Marketing Theory, 8(4): 339-366.

16

Böhm, S. and Land, C. (2009) ‘No Measure for culture?’, Capital and Class, 97: 79.

Böhm, S. and Land, C. (2012) ‘The New ‘Hidden Abode’: Reflections on Value and Labour in the

New Economy, The Sociological Review, forthcoming.

Böhm, S., & Dabhi, S. (eds.) (2009). Upsetting the Offset: The Political Economy of Carbon

Markets. London: Mayfly, http://mayflybooks.org/?page_id=21.

Braverman, H. (1974) Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth

Century. London: Monthly Review Press.

Brenner, R. (1977) ‘The Origins of Capitalist Development:a Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism’,

New Left Review, 104: 25-92.

Burawoy, M. (1982) Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labour Process Under Monopoly

Capitalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Business Week (2010) Why Apple and Others Are Nervous About Foxconn,

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_24/b4182035750226.htm

Cairns, G. (2007) ‘Postcard from Chittagong: wish you were here?’, Critical Perspectives on

International Business. 3(3): 266-279.

Cardoso, H. and Faletto, E. (1979) Dependency and Development in Latin America. Berkeley, CA:

University of California Press.

Carey, M. (2009) `It's a Bit Like Being a Robot or Working in a Factory': Does Braverman Help

Explain the Experiences of State Social Workers in Britain Since 1971? Organization 2009

16: 505-527.

Collinson, D. (1992), Managing the Shop Floor: Subjectivity, Masculinity and Workplace Culture,

Walter De Gruyter, Berlin.

Cooper, M. (2008) Experimental Labour—Offshoring Clinical Trials to China. EASTS, 2(1):73-92.

Davenport, T.H. and Beck, J.C. (2001) The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency

of Business. Cambridge: Harvard Business School Press.

De Angelis, M. (2006) The Beginning of History: Value Struggles and Global Capital. London:

Pluto.

Delbridge, R. (2007) Explaining Conflicted Collaboration: A Critical Realist Approach to

Hegemony, Organization Studies, 28: 1347-1357.

Dyer-Witheford, N. (2010) Digital labour, species-becoming and the global worker, ephemera,

10(3/4): 484-503.

Elson, D. (1979) Value: The Representation of Labour in Capitalism. London: CSE Books.

Ferguson, N. (2011) Civilization: The Six Ways the West Beat the Rest. London: Allen Lane.

Financial Times (2011) Resource stocks set to skew FTSE 100,

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/0cc5110e-7819-11e0-b90e-00144feabdc0.html

Freeman, A. (2010) Marxism without Marx: A note towards a critique. Capital & Class, 34 (1), 84-

97.

Fuchs, C. (2011a) A contribution to the critique of the political economy of Google. Fast Capitalism

8(1). http://www.fastcapitalism.com

Fuchs, C. (2011b) The contemporary world wide web: social medium or new space of

accumulation? In The political economies of media. The transformation of the global media

industries, eds. Dwayne Winseck and Dal Yong Jin, 201-220. London: Bloomsbury.

Fuchs, C. (2011c). Cognitive capitalism or informational capitalism? The role of class in the

information economy. In Cognitive capitalism, education and digital labor, ed. Michael Peters

and Ergin Bulut, 75-119. New York: Peter Lang.

Fuchs, C. (2012) The political economy of privacy on Facebook. Television & New Media 13 (2):

139-159.

Furtado, C. (1983) Accumulation And Development: The Logic Of Industrial Civilization. Oxford:

M. Robertson.

Gill, R. and Pratt, A. (2008) ‘In the Social Factory? Immaterial Labour, Precariousness and Cultural

Work’, Theory, Culture & Society, 25(7-8): 1-30.

17

Hardt, M. (2010) ‘The Common in Communism’, in C. Douzinas and S. Žižek (eds) The Idea of

Communism. London: Verso.

Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2000) Empire. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2004) Multitude. New York: Penguin.

Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2009) Commonwealth. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

Harvey, D. (1999) The Limits of Capital, Revised Edition. London: Verso.

Harvey, D. (2001) ‘The art of rent: Globalization and the commodification of culture’, in Spaces of

Capital: Towards a Critical Geography. London: Routledge.

Harvey, D. (2003) The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hassard, J., Hogan, J., & Rowlinson, M. (2001) From Labor Process Theory to Critical

Management Studies. Administrative Theory & Praxis, 23 (3), 339-362.

Herman, E. and Chomsky, N. (2002) The Manufacture of Consent: The Political Economy of the

Mass Media. New York: Pantheon Books.

Hesmondalgh, D. (2007) The Cultural Industries, 2nd Edition. London: Sage.

Jacques, R. (2000) ‘Theorizing knowledge as work: The need for a ‘knowledge theory of value’, in

C. Pritchard, R. Hull, M. Chumer and H. Willmott (eds.) Managing Knowledge: Critical

Investigations of Work and Learning. Basingstoke: Macmillan.

Kornberger, M. (2010) Brand Society: How Brands Transform Management and Lifestyle.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Land, C. and Taylor, S. (2010) ‘Surf’s Up: Life, Balance and Brand in a New Age Capitalist

Organization’, Sociology, 44(3): 395-413.

Land, C. and Taylor, S. (2011) ‘Be who you want to be: Branding, identity, and the desire for

authenticity’, in M. Brannan et al (eds.) Branded Lives: The Production and Consumption of

Meaning at Work. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

Lane, C. and Probert, J. (2009) National Capitalisms, Global Production Networks: Fashioning the

Value Chain in the UK, USA, and Germany. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lazzarato, M. (1996) ‘Immaterial Labour’, In Hardt, M. & Virno, P. (eds.) Radical Thought in

Italy: A Potential Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 133-147.

Le Ber, M.J. and Branzei, O. (2010) Towards a critical theory of value creation in cross-sector

partnerships, 17 (5), 599-629.

Levy, D. (2008) ‘Political Contestation in Global Production Networks,’ Academy of Management

Review, 33(4): 943-963.

Lipman, Z. (2002) ‘A Dirty Dilemma: The Hazardous Waste Trade’, Harvard International Review,

23(4): 67-71.

Lury, C. and Moor, L. (2010) ‘Brand Valuation and Topological Culture’, in M. Aronczyk and D.

Powers (eds.) Blowing up the Brand. New York: Peter Lang.

MacKenzie, J. (2001) Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance. London: Routledge.

Marazzi, C. (2010) The Violence of Financial Capitalism. New York: Semiotext(e).

Marx, Karl (1976) Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1. London: Penguin.

Marx, Karl (1981) Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 3. London: Penguin.

Midnight Notes Collective (1990) ‘The New Enclosures’, Midnight Notes, 10. Available at

http://www.midnightnotes.org/newenclos.html (accessed 30/03/2012).

Mittelman, J. (1995) Rethinking the international division of labour in the context of globalisation’,

Third World Quarterly, 16(2)

Mohun, S. (2004) ‘The Labour Theory of Value as Foundation for Empirical Investigations’,

Metroeconomica, 55(1): 65–95.

Montague, D. (2002) ‘Stolen Goods: Coltan and Conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo’,

SAIS Review, 22(1): 103-118.

Munck, R. (2002) Globalisation and labour: The new ‘Great Transformation’. London: Zed.

Munro, I. (2007) Information Warfare in Business. London: Routledge.

Negri, A. (1991) Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse. London: Pluto.

18

Noble, D. (2003) Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education. New York:

Monthly Review Press.

O’Connor, J. (2010) The Cultural and Creative Industries: A Literature Review. Newcastle upon

Tyne : Creativity, Culture and Education.

O’Doherty, D. and Willmott, H. (2001) Debating labour process theory: The issue of subjectivity

and the relevance of poststructuralism, Sociology, 35 (2), 457-76.

O’Doherty, D. and Willmott, H. (2009) The decline of labour process analysis and the future

sociology of work, Sociology, 43 (5), 931-951.

Perelman, M. (2000) Class Warfare in the Information Age. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

Prichard, C. and Mir, R. (2010) Editorial: Organizing value, Organization, 17: 507-515.

Read, J. (2001) ‘The Hidden Abode of Biopolitical Production: Empire and the Ontology of

Production’, Rethinking Marxism, 13(3): 24-30.

Rediker, M. (2007) The Slave Ship: A Human History. London: John Murray.

Ross, A. (2009) ‘The Rise of the Global University’, in A. Curcio et al. (eds) Toward a Global

Autonomous University. New York: Autonomedia.

Shaw, W. (2009) Marxism, Business Ethics, and Corporate Social Responsibility, Journal of

Business Ethics, 84 (4), 565-576.

Shukin, N. (2006) ‘The Mimetics of Mobile Capital’, The Sociological Review, 54(s1): 150–174.

Smythe, D. W. (1981) On the audience commodity and its work. In Media and cultural studies, eds.

M. G. Durham, and D. M. Kellner, 230–56. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Strangleman, T. (2004) Work Identity at the End of the Line? Privatisation and Culture Change in

the UK Railway Industry. Palgrave, Basingstoke.

Sullivan, S. (2010) ‘'Ecosystem Service Commodities' - A New Imperial Ecology? Implications for

Animist Immanent Ecologies, with Deleuze and Guattari’, New Formations, 69: 111-128.

Terranova, T. (2004) Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age. London: Pluto Press.

Thompson, P. (2007) Adler’s Theory of the Capitalist Labour Process: A Pale(o) Imitation,

Organization Studies, 28: 1359-1368.

Vercellone, C. (2007) ‘From Formal Subsumption to General Intellect’, Historical Materialism,

15(1): 13-36.

Vercellone, C. (2010) ‘The Crisis of the Law of Value and the Becoming-Rent of Profit’, in A.

Fumagalli and S. Mezzadra (eds) Crisis in the Global Economy: Financial Markets, Social

Struggles, and New Political Scenarios. New York: Semiotext(e).

Vidal, M. (2011) Reworking Postfordism: Labor Process versus Employment Relations, Sociology

Compass 5 (4), 273-286.

Wallerstein, I. (1974) The Modern World-System. New York, NY: Academic Press.

Warhurst, C. and Nickson, D. (2007) Employee experience of aesthetic labour in retail and

hospitality. Work Employment & Society 21 (1), 103-120.

Willmott, H. (2010) ‘Creating “value” beyond the point of production: branding, financialization

and market capitalization’, Organization, 17(5): 517-542.

Žižek, S. (2009) First as Tragedy, Then as Farce. London: Verso.