Co-creative prosumer labor, financial knowledge capitalism, and Marxist value theory

Abstract

ABSTRACTSome argue that the “co-creative labors” of “prosumers,” who often work for free on social media sites, represent new types of exploitation insofar that they provide novel ways for capitalists to accumulate surplus value. For others, however, prosumers illustrate how capitalism is now dominated by commercial and noncommercial informational networks that build brand value in innovative ways, especially through “immaterial” relations of communication and information. This article argues that each perspective has limitations. By working from an alternative Marxist perspective the article outlines some of these limitations and then argues that co-creative labor and prosumers are best explored as representing unproductive labor that helps transfer, but not produce, already generated surplus value from the productive to unproductive spheres of the global economy. Through their free labor, prosumers thus have the potential to cut costs for new media companies in the unproductive sphere of the economy. The article further suggests that the “unproductive” actions of prosumers are compatible with a financialized form of knowledge capitalism.