Transgressing between consumption and production: Materialistic outlook on the digital labour of prosumers

Introduction

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, severe turbulence ended the golden era of postwar capitalism. At the system level, it has resulted in inflation, expansion of public debt and, in subsequent decades, expansion of private debt and final consolidation (Streeck 2017a). These processes have been accompanied by deregulation, understood as the major reconstruction of the state engagement in financial and credit sector, labour market, and the social-welfare politics. Enterprises have faced the need of adjustment to new conditions, primarily, from their perspective, to profit squeeze and consumption deficit. Acceleration and intensification of communication and transport, along with changes in the organisation of work at the level of a company (post-Fordism) and beyond (outsourcing), have partially responded to the new needs. Furthermore, financialisation along with digitisation has shaped the new phase of capitalist accumulation. The first of these processes – as Streeck (2017a, 2017b) points out – is reminiscent of a remedy that results in undesirable side effects, rather than in a necessary therapeutic effect. According to Philipp Staab (2017), digital capitalism is the only ostensible solution to the consumption dilemma. In his point of view, large companies of the digital economy generate little additional demand. Their profits are based on the accelerated circulation of products and easier access to customers on the fragmented market. However, this process only intensifies the contradictions of capitalism by shortening product life cycle and forcing an even greater rate of accumulation.

New demands can only be seen in the shift from mass consumption of tangible goods to the consumption of personalised intangible commodities. The latter often exist as cultural goods. Their consumption – according to a Polish researcher Ryszard Nycz – increasingly takes ‘a verbal form’ and is thus described by verbs that relate to the notions of action, process and experience. But one of the contradictions of modern capitalism is that the consumption of experience – often mediated by relationships with other people in the form of service – requires customer time and attention. However, time must be divided between various actions during the limited hours of the day. Paid work and homework are essential to ensure a socially adequate standard of living. They reduce the possibility of conscious consumption of intangibles by hindering the generation of profits based on the commodification of such intangibles.

Thus, the material and discursive blurring of boundaries between paid work, homework and free time has continued since the 1970s. Such endeavours are so effective that they have led to a widely shared view on crossing the boundary between production and consumption (and consequently, also between the consumer and worker) and subsequently the formation of the prosumption society. Eran Fisher (2015) rightly states that the views on the subject can be subdivided into affirmative, initiated by Toffler (1980), and critical, some of which perceive the exploitative potential of prosumption. The latter is shared, as evident, by many critical researchers, starting with the eclectic arguments of Ritzer and Jurgenson (2010) and ending with arguments straight out of the Marxian Dictionary (Fuchs 2012). In our opinion, the arguments referring to Marx and his successors are chosen too freely, erroneously and most often – inconsistently. For example, an excellent paper by Humphreys and Grayson (2008) rightly places the spotlight on the distinction between exchange value and use value, but almost completely ignores the question of surplus value. Fisher (2015) very accurately emphasises the need for a dialectical understanding of prosumption, but his dialectic does not lead to a satisfactory synthesis. Rigi (2014a, 2014b) successfully embeds his analysis of intangible goods in the context of extra surplus value and monopoly but uses the concept of rent too freely and too broadly. Fuchs (2010, 2012, 2015) consistently defends Marx’s theory of value and correctly keeps a working perspective, but makes a serious mistake (Kangal 2016) by concentrating on the political dimension of language, and making too free a transition from the terms as used in their common sense to scientific language.

In this study, we conduct a materialist critique of the concept of prosumption using the above perspectives. We outline the historical background and refer to the concepts of use value and exchange value to additionally supplement them with a distinction between personal and private property. Then, we take a key step to put prosumption in its right place in the social division of labour. Once we have classified what kind of labour under what circumstances contributes to the emergence of capitalist profit in the digital economy (in areas associated with prosumption), we propose a typology of unpaid activities and their role in capital accumulation.

Prosumption and its background

The term prosumption is attributed to the American futurist Alvin Toffler (1980) who divided the economic history of mankind into three eras. First, the preindustrial wave was dominated by the prosumption thought of as the production of essential goods by the users themselves. The modern, industrial era (‘second wave’) separated the functions of producers and consumers. In the contemporary, postindustrial order, society moves from artificial separation (Ritzer 2015) of production and consumption towards a more balanced relationship between producers and consumers. From Ritzer’s (2015: 413–414) point of view, this balance means that ‘the process of prosumption involves the interrelationship of production and consumption where it becomes difficult (…) to clearly and unequivocally distinguish one from the other’. Ritzer agrees with Toffler on the diagnosis of the contemporary socioeconomic environment, yet, he sees the second wave differently. He contends that the distinction between producers and consumers has always been a false dichotomy. ‘This is because production always and in all settings involves consumption (…), and conversely consumption always and in all settings involves production’ (Ritzer 2015: 414). Prosumption, therefore, means a complex mutual relationship between the producer and consumer undertaken in conditions of blurred or absent boundaries between those two social roles. Ritzer (2015), like many others, highlights that ‘this is especially clear in work on the media’ (p. 414) particularly digital media. ‘Web 2.0 (…) allows users to partake in the production process; it fosters techniques and environments where consumers also produce, often while consuming’ (Fisher 2015: 126). On the Internet, the borders of business organisations are particularly blurred, the social roles are gaining enormous dynamism, and entertainment and work are intertwined.

This fact is widely accepted among scholars and results in an abundance of terms related to prosumption such as ‘co-creation’, ‘peer-production’ (Benkler 2006), ‘wikinomics’ (Tapscott & Williams 2006) or ‘prod-users’ (Bruns 2007). It should be emphasised that all these concepts refer to something more than an ‘old fashioned’ (Tapscott & Williams 2006) interaction between companies and consumers in creation and recreation of product. What binds the broad family of such concepts together is the conviction that the user is directly involved in the production, especially when we consider goods, which he (or she) himself or herself uses and needs. The recognition of the phenomenon led scholars to the acceptance of the term of ‘the rise of prosumer’ (Toffler 1980). From a Marxist perspective, this means rejecting fundamental division of abstract and concrete labour.

Although Toffler’s proposal suffers from the typical defects of secular prophecy and it is not clear if it describes the circular or dialectical version of history, we have to admit that his observations had some empirical justification. In the late 1960s, production capacity spurred on by the war effort, and postwar reconstruction hit the barrier of effective demand. The need for durable goods that significantly improve the quality of life had thus been satisfied. High production efficiency, accompanied by relatively high wages and a falling demand led to inflation. This fact elicited a response at the systematic level but ‘more important for our context were the strategies that firms deployed in their attempt to overcome the crisis of the product market’ (Streeck 2017b: 98). In a nutshell, companies began trying to adapt their products to the more personalised needs of the consumers and to convince them at the same time that their satisfaction depends on the purchase of a particular product. As a result, the first recipient of a company’s activities is now an individual consumer, the market has been divided into niches and the importance of advertising has grown tremendously. In the context of financialisation, capitalist enterprises further specialised. The importance of capital circulation has obviously increased, as have that of advertising, marketing, market research and other such sectors. Another after-effect was the internal reorganisation of enterprises. The drop in demand increased the risk of the business activity, so companies have now been looking for ways to diversify that risk by subdividing and outsourcing of their peripheral tasks (for the show business example, see Storper 1989). Fragmentation of the market, in turn, spurred on the partition of products into smaller parts, which make it easier to divide tasks within emerging supply chains. ‘It is true that this turns the seller’s market of Fordism into buyers’ markets, empowering consumers in ways inconceivable just a few years earlier, and making life much more difficult for producers’ (Streeck 2017b: 99–100). In that sense, many Toffler’s claims were correct. Consumers are appreciated and involved in product development.

Probably this fact is nowhere as evident as in the media and communication businesses. In the 1970s ‘it was in the newly privatized sector of telecommunications and television that commercialisation progressed more than anywhere else’ (Streeck 2017b: 104). Television became a commodity, an area of capital expansion and it also enabled the commodification of other fields (e.g. sport, art). Soon the first concepts of the public providing free labour appeared (Smythe 1981), and when in the 1990s the Internet became a mass medium, the concept was also applied to the digital environment. Moreover, the commercialisation of the Internet was quite similar to that of television before, except that in the 1990s the debt state of the 1980s evolved into a consolidation state (Streeck 2017a, 2017b).

Already in the second half of the 1980s, the Internet infrastructure became an area of massive investment. This trend continued in the 1990s and was supplemented by enormous expenditure on software. The computer industry, especially the Silicon Valley, became a significant target of venture capital investments. In less than two decades, the Internet had been completely commodified. In the same manner as television before, it developed into a commodity and a means of transforming other areas into commodities (e.g. social relations).

Keynesianism of the postwar era was replaced by ‘privatized Keynesianism’.

As we now know, two things came together to rescue the neoliberal model from the instability that would otherwise have been its fate: the growth of credit markets for poor and middle-income people, and of derivatives and futures markets among the very wealthy. This combination produced a model of privatised Keynesianism. (Crouch 2009: 390)

In this market regime, the state changed its role concentrating on regulatory and punishment policies (Wacquant 2009), which – combined with the custody of central banks over interest rates – enables private households to supplement their income with debt, taken, however, at their own risk. This risk has been managed by the financial elites of New York Wall Street and the City of London, which promised a new growth model. As Crouch (2009) puts it, once privatised, Keynesianism had become a general pattern of economic development, it became a kind of collective good. ‘In a world where the US government was trying to reduce its deficits, fiscal stimulus was out of the question’. This ‘asset-price Keynesianism offered an alternative way to get the economy growing in the absence of deficit spending and competitive manufacturing’ (Srnicek 2016: 23).

Prosumption and what is wrong with it?

What we said above creates an important context for reflection on contemporary prosumption most often associated with digital work and cooperation (among others p2p and peer production). Incidentally, it is worth stressing that the first special issue to critique peer-to-peer production from a Marxist perspective was published in this journal (Moore & Karatzogianni 2009).

First, it should be understood as part of a more complex historical process triggered by the crisis of overproduction started in the late 1960s. Second, it was not an emancipation process; it did not lead to any significant shift in producers or consumers freedom (Bauman 2007; Comor 2010). Third, even if we agreed that consumer–producer relation has changed since the 1970s - especially in the context of the new media – we need to reconstruct what the exact essence of this change was (e.g. how they are related to the exploitation process, see Moore & Taylor 2009). Fourth, we have to remember that concepts of production and consumption are rooted in class relations. Should we forget about it, we risk losing sight of the variety of ways to understand production. The producer might be described as a capitalist enterprise (as in managerial literature), as a worker who performs manual labour, as an employee in a more general sense or, finally, as someone who contributes to the final product. Analogously, consumption itself can describe different moments in production relations. Consumption of the means of production occupies a completely different place in these relations than the consumption of the final product.

Ritzer (2015) and Ritzer and Jurgenson (2010: 17) ignore these facts and build their argument on ‘the idea that the focus should always have been on the prosumer’. If the capitalist world was always the world of prosumer, why should we need a new concept to describe it? In other words, either modern capitalism has changed so much that we need a new theoretical apparatus or have not changed and we do not need it. It cannot be argued that the substance of the relationship between producer and consumer has not changed (‘always have been on the prosumer’) and that is why we do indeed need the idea of prosumption. More importantly, Ritzer (2015) is aware of this logical error and tries to escape it by pointing to the importance of new (i.e. digitally mediated) forms of prosumption. We will go back to this contention, but first, we want to point out that when Ritzer builds his distinctions on old and new prosumption, or prosumption-as-production and prosumption-as-consumption, he neglects the fundamental distinction between the means of production and consumer goods (Marx’s sector one and two). He even recalls Karl Marx and insists that ‘he fully understood that production always involved consumption (and vice versa), clearly believed that it was production that was pre-eminent in the capitalism of his day’ (Ritzer & Jurgenson 2010: 14). Notwithstanding this, Ritzer and Jurgenson have forgotten that in the production process, it is both the objects and means of work that are consumed. The means of production are used in the process of creating new value by adding living labour to dead labour. On the contrary, during the consumption of the final good, the realisation process takes place. A certain need is fulfilled, and exchange value is completed, while, at the same time, use value is (at least) partially use-up. Both moments occupy different places in the circulation of capital.

Humphreys and Grayson (2008) indicate that ‘the transformation of a commodity into money (the act of production and selling) and the transformation of money into a commodity (the act of purchase and consumption) are “two opposite and complementary movements”’ (p. 966). The authors aptly point to the Marxian distinction between use and exchange value as crucial for understanding the misconceptions connected with the concept of prosumption. It allows one to perceive the naivety of assumption that every human act produces economic value. When the consumer brews his or her coffee, takes away his or her own meal in the fast food or pours himself or herself gasoline, she/he produces (usually) only a small portion of this particular use value in addition to the value she/he consumes himself/herself. So such a consumer performs only concrete labour for his/hers use but does not produce any surplus value or exchange value. ‘If consumers are expending labour for personal benefit – for example assembling their desk or designing their handbag – the results of their labour are not sold for exchange value and are therefore not commoditised’ (Humphreys & Grayson 2008: 972).

So why do some scholars claim that during presumption surplus value is created and the exploitation of free labour is taking place? It is because consumers’ effort allows capitalists to employ fewer workers. However, as Comor (2015) puts it nicely ‘commodification, (…) is not the unproblematic precursor to exploitation and value creation’ (p. 17). Moreover, Tofflerian (traditional says Ritzer) prosumption should be considered as a result of the class struggle between (mostly) commercial capital and its employees. Thus, the fact that a particular process (consumers activation) affects the other (routinisation of retail trade work) does not mean that either can be identified.

Looking for a precise definition of prosumption, we should assume that it might be expressed as ‘a creation of value that takes place during consumption itself’. Of course, if consumption has to create value, there is only one commodity that has such ability and it is labour power. According to Marx, the only human capacity to work once it has been purchased, thus becoming a commodity, has the capacity to produce more than it is worth. Its use-value is consumed in the production process as labour. Therefore, only human ability to work is capable to produce new value during consumption (is capable to ‘prosumption’). However, unlike the followers of the modern idea of prosumption, Marx believed that in capitalism prosumption is to be found only in the production process (as abstract labour). Likewise, he held that only labour engaged in monetary exchange (purchase as a commodity, i.e. engaging in private property relations) is abstract labour and produces exchange value. So, critical Marxian scholars accurately focus their attention on the work and labour. Moreover, as mentioned earlier, prosumption is most often located in the area of the digital economy no wonder, then, that the attention of researchers mentioned below concentrated in this area. However, at the same time, some of them ignore the distinction between abstract and concrete labour, claiming that in today’s digital economy, unpaid work on the Internet also produces surplus value.

Prosumption in Neo-Marxian persecutive

Above described belief is rooted in the general conviction that ‘capital makes use of gratis labour, which is just another formulation for saying that capital exploits all members of society for itself’ (Fuchs 2010: 188). This assumption is especially relevant when we consider the digital economy because on the web the majority of results of social relations take immaterial form. For example, Eran Fisher (2015) criticises Humphreys and Grayson (2008) for ignoring the new environment where prosumption takes place and for overlooking the ability of digital prosumption to mobilise new forces of production that could not have been present in the traditional ‘analog’ economy. What Fisher has in mind is most obviously connected with the creation of knowledge (e.g. peer production but as Vaden and Suoranta (2009) pointed out it is a long way from digital communities to cybercommunism). If knowledge is rightly collective – a social common process (Fuchs 2010) – it is even more so in the case of the modern digital economy, especially related to cultures such as music, cinema, video games and fashion. As the author of ‘free work’ concept puts it: ‘to emphasise how labour is not equivalent to employment also means to acknowledge how important free affective and cultural labour is to the media industry, old and new’ (Terranova 2000: 46). Indeed, Fisher (2015), ‘the notion of immaterial labour points to the production of surplus-value done outside the established loci of production, such as the factory and the office’ (p. 134). So, according to this point of view, the digital environment of the World Wide Web creates new conditions for the formation of surplus value in which unpaid prosumers play crucial role.

The most prominent figure of this concept, Christian Fuchs (2012), argues that ‘due to the permanent activity of the recipients and their status as prosumers, we can say that in the case of (…) the Internet the audience commodity is an Internet prosumer commodity’ (p. 43). Therefore, the subject of exploitation in cases of new media giants, such as Google or Facebook, are not merely those employed by these corporations, but also the users (prod-users, prosumers) engaged in the production of user-generated content (Fuchs 2012: 191). Fuchs argues that digital capitalists of the Internet are engaged in the accumulation of surplus-value based on users’ exploitation. Describing the political economy of Google, Fuchs (2012: 44) comes to the conclusion that Google’s core service – advertisement – is powered by the unpaid work of all Internet users. According to Fuchs, the product of user effort and knowledge is sold to advertisers as a commodity. Prosumers are the producers of this commodity, as they perform free labour, and so they are exploited. Brice Nixon (2015) goes in the Fuchs’s footsteps claiming that the political economy of Google can then be understood as a matter of accumulating capital by extracting value from digital audience labour. ‘Primarily as a process in which Google lends digital space to advertisers in return for a money payment that (…) is similar to an interest payment’ (Nixon 2015: 4). Others Fuchs’s followers add that ‘not only Internet users’ labour (…) but also users’ aggregated consciousnesses are commodities of Google’ (Kang and McAllister 2011: 151). No wonder then that Fuchs (2017: 5) goes as far as to compare unpaid labour to slave-labour and considers prosumers (or prod-users) as a class.

By denying the productivity of audience labour we fail to see the exploitative nature of social media companies, but also neglect to see users as a class, thus failing to see an opening for a class struggle from within digital capitalism. (Fuchs & Fisher 2015: 19)

Fuchs’s point of view should be commended for consistent adherence to the perspective of labour. However, at the same time, it contains a number of serious flaws. First, it is hard to say why – as Fuchs seems to claim – the refusal to recognise social media users as a class would be tantamount to rejecting the critique of the media corporations themselves. If we assume that writing a post on the News Feed on Facebook is a productive labour, we lose sight of the basic criteria for distinguishing social classes. A student, pupil, unpaid household worker, construction worker, the well-known journalist, stockbroker or business owner can all build the same content of the social network site. Does it mean they are members of the same class? Fuchs (2015) believes so when he writes: ‘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 loses money’ (p. 39). Leaving aside the possibility of such a strike, we should ask how this class position of Facebook users relate to more traditional divisions? Is this distinction more or less important than the classical division between labour and capital? In addition, Fuchs insists that the paid employees of the digital economy, as well as prosumers, are productive workers because he believes that only then they can be considered a political entity. As Wolff and Resnick (2006) successfully proved, it is possible to use less physically embedded and politically entrenched understanding of productive labour and continue to demand emancipation of groups performing other activities (see also Comor 2015; Mohun 1996). Briefly, a postulate of the direct applicability of the scientific terminology to politics, inherent in Fuchs’s work, seems unreasonable and leads to unsatisfactory results, both from the point of view of precision of scientific apparatus and that of political practice.

Moreover, treating prosumers as a class – as Fuchs wants us – we are faced with the question of the demands of this class? Should it be a reduction of working hours, smaller work intensity or greater work safety? All the postulates are unfounded since the consumer himself/herself decide where, how and to what extent s/he uses social media. As Srnicek (2016) observes, this is because the online media relationship with the users is not a labour relationship (it does not have any features of labour relation) and the labour of consumers is only concrete labour (if any). In Fuchs’s writings, this fact takes the form of indecision what object takes the form of commodity, is it a data volume or labour power of prod-users. This inexactness was noticed by Kangal (2016) when he asked,

whether the data that were sold to the third party were already a commodity before they were processed by media platforms, or they were commodified through this procedure. Fuchs is unclear about this. On the one hand, he claims that digital media ‘collects all private data and user behaviour and commodifies both’, but on the other hand, he asserts that users’ activity is productive labour [is a commodity itself]. (p. 7)

Third, the theoretical approach of Fuchs and his followers ignores the place in the social division of labour occupied by prosumers. Kangal (2016) and Comor (2015) underline that Fuchs underestimates the financial aspect of the digital economy, ignores the importance of commodity exchange based on money and complexity of the social division of labour.

The exchange relation is not the relation between online media users and online media owners, but the media company with its employees and the media company with other companies. In the Marxian sense, we deal neither with labour nor with productive labour when considering the users of Web 2.0 media. (Kangal 2016: 6)

Information as a rent and information as a property

Jakob Rigi (2014a, 2014b, 2015) devotes more attention to above issues than Fuchs. On one hand, he compliments Fuchs’s attachment to value theory but, on the other hand, argues that, while a piece of information may have a price, its exchange value always tends towards zero. ‘Therefore, the price of information does not, as Fuchs claims, represent a value that is embedded in it but is instead rent’ (Rigi 2014b: 911). This assumption means that the information has no (exchange) value mostly because it is a singular, indivisible commodity. It has almost no value on its own because its exchange value always tends towards zero. The fact is particularly evident when we consider unpaid work.

The rate of exploitation (…) can be only measured if both parts of time consist of homogenous units. If the temporal unity of labour has vanished, then it no longer makes sense to speak of surplus-value. The alleged surplus-value is a surplus to what? (Rigi 2015: 202, see also Comor 2015)

Therefore, the value of information, which is appropriated by digital media companies is created elsewhere. According to Rigi (2014b), information in the capitalist economy appearing as science and technology is the decisive factor in the production of relative surplus value.

IT technology, science, innovations, knowledge and information constitute paradigmatic productive forces of contemporary capitalism. Information plays a central role in mediating the production of relative surplus value, on the one hand, and the distribution of the total social surplus value in forms of surplus profit and rent, on the other. (Rigi 2014b: 932)

For this reason, Rigi acknowledged that intellectual property rights (IPR) holders receive their share of surplus value in the form of rent. In his point of view knowledge and information – in their natural form – remind land. As such, they can only be commoditised through fencing. This is precisely what IPR, trade secrets, exclusivity agreements, competition bans and so on do; they create fences, or using more economically rooted language – build monopoly.

At the general level, Rigi’s theoretical proposals are interesting and relevant. The author rightly observes that the information has only an indirect impact on surplus value creation (see Jeon 2010, 2011) and that it is very apt to insist on taking into account all social capital or the entire valorisation process. On the other hand, his concept of economic rent seems to be too broad. This objection is particularly pertinent if we compare the knowledge to land. First, knowledge and information are results of deliberate human activity while the land is a gift of nature. Second, the stock of farmland is quantitatively limited while knowledge is not. Even in a highly regulated IPR environment, there is no barrier to creating knowledge of the same utility (e.g. cryptographic method or drug). Third, there is no such thing as overproduction of knowledge. Thanks to its nonrivalry, knowledge can be used infinitely (e.g. knowledge of friction or gravity, information on the atomic number of hydrogen, etc.). The land is the exact opposite. It is scarce, its consumption is based on rivalry and the productivity of the soil is gradually exhausted. Fourth, legal regulations have an ambiguous effect on economic activity connected with knowledge, while land fencing is always a barrier. In other words, we should not exclude the possibility that the chance of commodification of knowledge is for many inventors, scholars or writers the primary motive to create one.

These reservations put aside, the whole misunderstanding stems actually from the fact that Rigi is using ‘the rent theory of ownership’ despite the fact he does not seem to have grasped taken into account of its key tenets. This socioeconomic perspective saw property as the existence of not earned income and one’s ability to hold to and/or to dispose of the ownership.

What lies at the heart of the socio-economic theory of ownership (…) is that the benefits inherent in the ownership of the factors of economic activity always are, to a lesser or larger extent, gratuitous. (…) It is precisely for that reason that – referring to the economic notion of rent as an unearned income – our whole approach to property may be called: ‘the rent theory’ (Tittenbrun 2011: 21).

The rent theory of ownership allows catching overarching valorisation of capital in the forms of various objects of ownership, for example, money, means of production and labour power. Given this theory, each copy of copyrighted good sold above the costs of manufacture of the first unit is pure property: It brings the supplier a rental income. In the case of patents, the point is even more evident. When the innovation patented is related to the means of production, the patent, put simply, helps produce the given object of production more efficiently, and, by extension, it allows it to absorb relative surplus value. The savings achieved through the innovation are thus – again after covering the costs of innovation – kind of unearned income. Notwithstanding, innovation always results from human work. Knowledge workers seek to develop new knowledge, the application of which will increase the productivity of living labour of manual workers. If they succeed, the capitalist who employs them can achieve extra surplus value, but when they fail their wages are the cost for the capitalist. Accepting Rigi’s claim that the price of information quickly drops to zero, success brings a rental profit. However, it cannot be forgotten that before unearned income is generated, expenditure outlay on the creation of the first unit of information has to take place. There always exists the very first unit of it. It has a particular use value even if it gains exchange value only through IPR. Hence, what we are dealing with is property as rent and not equivalent to the ground rent. Marx claimed that all forms of rent, like all forms of profit and interest, in the last instance are surplus labour. This position can be interpreted as a direct incentive to reconstruct the dialectical relations of ownership, therefore, the actual forms of redistribution of surplus value and the actual forms and flows of capital. In real social relationships, the production, distribution and income of information and knowledge can differ. We need to look at the exact conditions of information formation and its relation to value to answer what kind of activity we are referring to.

Personal and private property, quasiwork and work

As mentioned above, prosumption is rarely limited to a company–customer relationship and is often equated with the more general issue of the consumer’s input to value creation process. Therefore, further, we will take a closer look at the particular moments of valorisation of the capital identified with prosumption. We will use the same ‘rent theory of property’, which gives us the tools to precisely investigate the prosumer’s activity in the digital environment. It uses an instrumental distinction between personal and private property. As Stanislaw Kozyr-Kowalski et al. (1997) puts it, the socioeconomic analysis divides the particular objects of property according to their relation to the commodity exchange and the social division of labour. It refers to personal property, those consumer goods that serve only the needs of the individual and cannot, in the given economic and social relations, be subject to exchange. The same goods are transformed into the private property when they can be sold at any time. Means of production are personal possessions when they produce goods for the owner and his family but neither can their products nor the means of production be sold. They become private property when they produce market goods and can themselves be sold.

As we can see, this approach is put in the centre of the social division of labour and commodity exchange. This becomes even more evident if we present these categories along the classic Marxian notions of exchange and use value and the questions of the absorption of its benefits (see Table 1; for clarity, we used a deliberate division into traditional material production and the digital environment).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Table 1.

Analysis of production and consumption considering property relations and value creation

		Use value consumed by		Exchange value absorbed by
		Direct producer	Someone else	Direct producer	Someone else
Personal property (quasiwork)	Traditional production	Gardening, tinkering, mending	Neighbourhood help	-	Positive externalities, such as the increase in real estate prices.
	Digital environment	Photo storage in the cloud, software prepared for personal use.	Sharing content on the web, contribution to open software	-	Commercialization of GPL software, fanart, etc.
Private property	Traditional production	Remuneration in kind	Consumption of purchased goods	Self-employment	Employment relationship
	Digital environment	Free access to proprietary software for company employees.	Paid consumption of knowledge.	Self-employed online: i.e. software development, streaming online, youtubing	Employment by digital economy companies

When we distinguish use and exchange value, and the relations of personal (nonmarket) and private property, it becomes evident that traditional prosumption described by Toffler (1980) is nothing more than a specific way of externalising labour costs or the type of products/services created for personal use. The former usually do not produce a new surplus value and do not reduce Toffler’s Sector B. Most of the examples used by Toffler (such as tinkering equipment and medical outfit for home use), do not exemplify an increase of the role of the consumers but the creation of new markets (so far reserved for professionals).

However, in this article, we are more interested in prosumers operating in the digital world. So what difference does the Internet bring? Most of the relevant social science literature discusses four cases.

Examples of this type of activity include software creation for personal use, movies or photos storage in the cloud, communication with close family using digital tools and so on. Such activities do not create surplus value themselves but may indirectly influence the processes of commodification and marketisation. For example, when we send personal photos to family members via the Internet, we do not have to use the traditional post. A closed channel on YouTube allows us to magnify memories of our children (in the video form) without buying tapes or paying for virtual memory. This kind of behaviour changes the market and influences the emergence and realisation of surplus value, but does not create this value itself. It creates use value for the user and his or her family or friends. Of course in the digital environment, all actions leave the digital footprint that can be absorbed as a source of ‘big data’. We will return to this below.

The high level of socialisation necessary for the existence of Internet infrastructure is conducive to a high socialisation of its users. Therefore, examples of above mention activities are relatively rare, and more often we observe effort that can be call quasiwork open to others/unknown people. Moreover, this type of activity most often gains the label of contemporary prosumption. We mean, for example, collaborating on open source projects, sharing creativity, amateur subbing for movies and TV shows, publishing content through social media and so on. These activities are useful for other network users but are not a source of financial support for the quasiworker. In other words, the content creator is not capable of appropriating the exchange value of his or her work (Kleinert 2010). The effects of such endeavour are the object of personal property and have only use value.

Again, a lot of confusion is caused by the fact that personal property relations present in one part of the socioeconomic system can influence private property in other places. This is most often the case when the subject of property relations is an ideal mean of production. For example, free use of open source software makes it possible to reduce the costs of paid IT personnel (Dafermos & Söderberg 2009). Amateur translations prepare the audience for the official releases of cultural content (as has happened in the case of anime career in the United States). Activity in social media influences the progress of the precarisation of media professions and so on, which is not a new phenomenon. Use-value created outside the market relations has always influenced the shape of the latter (even in the form of reproductive work). In this case, use-value is used (consumed) by the producer and the community, with whom she/he chooses to share it. This use value indirectly influences the exchange value of goods available on the market (including the value of the labour power).

We face yet another socioeconomic relationship when a result of community members’ quasiwork becomes an object of private appropriation. Such an object, created outside the market (object of personal property), is transformed into private property. Usually, this process requires additional, paid or profit-oriented work. At that very time, this extra work can be seen as being exploited (or self-exploited). Moreover, the appropriated item is treated as ‘free good’ or ‘common good’ and is a source of unearned income (from the perspective of the private owner it is a pure property). In literature, we can find numerous examples of such situations from commercialisation of fanart to businesses based on GPL-licence software. In the Polish fansubbers community, a longtime community leader, nickname Sokar, wanted to sell a website associating amateur-translators and thereby appropriate their free effort in the form of a private profit (Mika 2015). In the Czech Republic, the community developing the noncommercial wireless network named ‘Ronja’ has become a game field of product commercialisation (Söderberg 2010); the same happened with the 3D printers community (Söderberg 2016). Another good example is the data left by social media users on the servers of Facebook or Google, which is used as raw material by the companies’ IT workers (Kangal 2016; Srnicek 2016). In short, the effect of the quasiwork of prosumers is intercepted by external entities and, as a result of the work of their employees, changed into an object of their private property.

The last type of work often analysed in connection with digital prosumption is income activity on one’s account. Usually, work of that kind demands far-reaching commodification of labour, blurs the boundaries between free and labour time and brings diversified income. Their common feature is the acquisition of livelihood based on individual effort, sometimes an extreme effort that combines different tasks. ‘Our interviewees often experienced multiple types of employment simultaneously, such as formal employment and freelancing in their leisure time, or freelancing and subcontracting for a specific project’ (Bergvall-Kåreborn & Howcroft 2013: 970). This group includes, for example, apps developers (Bergvall-Kåreborn & Howcroft 2013), search algorithm controllers (Bilić 2016) or video streamers (Postigo 2014). They all work in an environment dominated by big companies with great potential for monopolising the digital environment (Srnicek 2016) called it ‘the platform capitalism’. This is particularly evident in the three-sided market (common among digital platforms), where responsibility for the workplace is blurred. ‘One of the clear outcomes emerging from the evolution of the computing industry is the rise of a small number of elite power brokers in the form of high-tech firms’ (Bergvall-Kåreborn & Howcroft 2014: 213). Analysing the activity of companies selling 3D printers, Söderberg (2016) sees in these processes the return to classic workplace conflicts over the control of work. The digital work provided by the majority of self-employed has more characteristics of the cottage industry than prosumption. In the end, ‘occasional experiments with making a living from communities are rendered systematic by start-up firms and venture capital; a division of labour crystallises between communities of developers, crowds of users and clouds of piece-rate workers’ (Söderberg 2016: 13). In the case of digital self-employed, all arguments are on the side of the platform owners. As long as platforms are catching up with new users and achieve relevant web page traffic, the success of individual projects is not important to them. Even successful microbusinesses, streaming stars and YouTubers become merely a vehicle for attracting new advertisers.

Conclusion

Typology presented in Table 1 allows for further detailed analyses. It should be read as part of a larger whole that allows – according to the dialectic method – to read specific moments of the broader process of valorisation of capital. At this point, we concentrated on activities most often described as prosumption (e.g. we did not discuss the lucrative digital work in the heart of the Silicon Valley or any other paid work). Proper classification is not easy because they cover a comperhensive spectrum. We have tried to apply consistent classification criteria focusing on the point of view of activity performer. We asked whether a particular activity produces an exchange or use-value (or both). We also tried to determine its place in the social division of labour and answer whether it is engaged in personal or private property relations. Our analysis suggests the following:

To sum up, the concept of prosumption should be considered as too vague to be useful. It imprecisely expresses the processes that have been going on since the late 1960s. We refer here to the crisis of Fordism, the emergence of a customer-oriented market, the growing importance of finance, commerce and advertising. However, the rarity of these processes did not undermine the division between consumers and producers. This had not even been changed by the media revolution of the 1970s and the network revolution of the 1990s. Using the classic categories of Marxian dictionaries, we can distinguish abstract from concrete work, exchange from use value and private from personal property. Through this procedure, the analysis may take into account the commodity exchange, the role of money and the social division of labour. In doing so, we solve a number of theoretical problems: we do not multiply the theoretical entity beyond the need, we avoid difficulties in determining what is working time in the case of ‘free or unpaid work’, we explain the ambivalent attitude of large companies to the open source community, we readily use the concepts of monopoly and rent or we do not have to answer the question what object is commodified in the process of the prosumers’ work or its effect, to name but a few.

This position is not tantamount to saying that nothing has changed in the digital era. On the contrary, many processes have been powerfully accelerated; employment has been fragmented, platform-mediated employment has rendered the responsibility for working conditions ambiguous, and the capabilities of computing machines have enabled the use of digital data. These processes have made the work phenomenon more complex but have not changed its capitalist essence.