engleski

Social and economic form determination of monopoly digital platforms

Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft (GAFAM) held a collective annual revenue of 899 $billion in 2019. If they were a national economy, they would be ranked on the 18 th spot among countries ordered by GDP by the World Bank in 2018. In March 2020 they held a 4.9 $trillion market capitalisation occupying top spots of all publicly traded companies, spots previously reserved for banks and oil companies. Reports, debates and calls for challenging and regulating monopolies in markets ranging from web search, social networking, cloud computing, app distribution, online advertising, and online retail are common in business and daily press, regulatory and policy debates. Outrage over socially damaging practices is now found across the public sphere. In other to change and regulate any kind of production its character has to be well understood. Deriving our insights from New Readings of Marx literature, we conceptualise the full production and valorisation cycle of advertising funded digital platforms Google and Facebook, accounting for the specific social and economic character of the production, its inputs and outputs. Our approach is methodologically grounded in grasping elements of production, circulation and consumption through the notions of social forms and economic determination of form. In our understanding, the central products of advertising based digital platforms have a peculiar social and economic form. We can say they are valueless (Teixeira/Rotta), since no monetary exchange takes places in return for consumption of Google’s web search, Gmail, Google Maps, Google Drive or Facebook’s social networking services, communication apps, and other outputs. However, a different type of exchange takes place in the background. Digital platforms obtain consumer preferences by gathering and processing data on their on-line behaviour. Data enables targeted advertising, whose aim is to lead a consumer to purchase a commodity, finally enabling exchange value to be realised and surplus value to be extracted. There is little new there, decades before the Internet free of charge radio and TV stations rested on the same principle of valorisation of its production through advertising. The situation is more complex with digital platforms on the input side. Public funding has played a key role in the last few decades for the development of computing and networking. Furthermore, a vast portion of software that runs Internet websites utilised as means of production on digital platforms does not take a form of commodity. Instead, it is released under a set of licences, which either legally ban the commodity form (Free Software Copyleft strict types of licences) or which make it optional under specific circumstances (Open Source permissive licences). Variety of inputs and outputs found in the production of digital platforms that do not fit Marx’s categories, along with their monopoly tendencies, has been a challenge for Marxist scholars. We argue that by grasping and applying Marx’s methodology of social and economic determination of form, a set of categories consistent with his overall approach can be developed in order to account for such contemporary phenomena.

Social forms, monopoly, digital platforms

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