Blogging in the Capitalist Mode of Production

The technologically determinist history of blogging presented above, which unfortunately constitutes the bulk of literature on the topic, does little to illuminate the material conditions fostering blogging’s emergence in the late-capitalist economy. Due to the dearth of critical research on blogging, a proper starting point for a critical analysis of blogging is the history of the development of “new media,” comprised of digital and computer-based communications technologies, and the rhetoric surrounding blogging that obfuscates it. In his political economy of new media, Philip Graham notes that because capitalism, in its earliest stages, concerned itself with the production of concrete commodities like linen and cotton, it depended almost exclusively on the control and deployment of physical labor power; consequently, capitalists developed technologies to “appropriate, commodify, and later replace” human labor power (p. 135). Throughout the history of capitalism, from Gutenberg to Bill Gates, it is a monopoly on knowledge and information that has fueled the innovation of these technologies. Knowledge is power, and those with power have historically attempted to secure their positions by restricting access emergent technologies, shaping through this control the character of knowledge of the age (Innis in Graham, p. 144). Robins and Webster concur that “the appropriation of information and information resources have always been a constitutive aspect of capitalist societies” (p. 63). The later shift from physical to automated labor, accompanied by the Fordism and Taylorism of the early twentieth century, created an entire industry of information and technology management (Sussman, 1997, pp. 79; Adorno and Horkheimer, 1993). In an enlightened discussion on media in which he situates Marx’s ideas with regard to technology and the forces and relations of production within Castells’ “Mode of Development,” Wayne explains that none of these technologies occur outside the fundamental dynamics of capital but actually exist to reinforce the growth and concentration of capital by controlling the “flows of perpetual transformation of technological forces and social relations.” He sees the building of “knowledge upon knowledge,” that emerged as a by-product of industrialization as a process in which the forces of communication become pivotal to the forces of production (p. 45). Through this lens, the means by which a commodity is produced becomes more important than what is actually produced.
New media and its offspring, blogging, did not emerge organically as the dominant history portrays, but rather is predicated upon this complex series of technological innovations designed to increase productivity that facilitates the extraction of surplus value from labor by capitalists. Marx identified early on the dialectic of the potential embedded in these technologies when he noted in the Manifesto of the Communist Party that the forces of production operating to extract surplus value, like ICTs, enslave labor while providing the material conditions for their emancipation (p. 481). According to the labor theory of value, the decreased labor time brought about by efficient technologies does little to decrease the amount of work people are doing yet continues to increase the surplus labor time dedicated to the production of value over and above what they receive in wages (Marx, 1972, p. 344). Capital increasingly pervades even the “free-time” of the wage earner until productive activities constitute the entirety of people’s lives (Adorno in Graham, p. 136). This discrepancy between the length of the working day as necessary to produce an item as seen by the laborer and to produce profit as the capitalist sees fit provides the basis, according to Marx in Capital Volume 1, for the class struggle between the owners of capital and the laborers in the capitalist system (1972, p. 364).
This continuous exploitation of labor is obvious in the act of blogging. Take, for example, the case of Christopher (his screen name), a self-avowed technophile and blogging enthusiast, who works as a blogger for the Suicide Girls website . Although his “official” job title is “Lead News Editor,” the work he describes sounds more like digital piecework than a profession: he works from home for hours at a time, interacting physically with software and hardware that he, not the company, has purchased. He is not represented by any union, is not entitled to minimum wage, and is paid by his employer for work completed only if he hits his monthly quota of 152 posts per month. Despite these deplorable conditions, he sees his work as “memory work rather than actual labor. We [bloggers] make connections and research past events…. I think that bloggers freely and openly resist any monopoly or restriction on access” (Ross, personal communication, 2005). Christopher’s perceptions of this work characterize what Marx describes as the socialization of production. Because he has purchased them, it is likely that Christopher sees the digital systems that enable him to reproduce/redirect information at increasing rates as belonging to him when in actuality they are fixed forms of capital that enable him to both produce and consume in the “blogosphere.” His machine is simultaneously the “property of capital” and the embodiment of “the general productive power of society’s intelligence” (Marx’s Gundrisse in Wayne, p. 48). This contradiction between the commodification of his personal property and time and the revolutionary potential inherent in his actions expresses one of the fundamental conflicts in capitalism, the tension between the forces of production and the relations of production.