Text Sushi by Alf Rehn

Today, the question of community stands as perhaps the most potent symptom of contemporary business schizophrenia. On one hand, businesses are increasingly sticking to a radical form of individualistic egoism, with ideas about maximizing shareholder value, free agency or one-to-one marketing presenting a perfectly fragmented world. On the other, ideas about affiliation, communities (on the web or off – and what is a brand except the fetish of a community around a commodity?) and similar linked-in phenomena are dominating much of the discussion about what business is developing into. Of course, both these positions could be seen as punditry, as either scare-mongering or as over-hyping relatively minor movements. Still, they capture something of a Zeitgeist, a belief in that Tönnies old separation between the Gemeinschaft and the Gesellschaft would be not only important, but critical for understanding contemporary business practice.

If we take the frenzy that has erupted over sites such as MySpace, YouTube and flickr (sites I like, except MySpace – and this is probably due to me being too old), we can see something like a Damascene revelation in business media. Communities have value that cannot be reduced to individual production! Well, duh. To an extent this seems to be an extension of the old “the value is in the network”-liturgy we’ve heard since the dawn of the internet age, complete with inane references to “if there’s only one fax, it isn’t worth that much, but imagine how the value increases as additional faxes are connected to the network….” And, in both cases, we see that people still don’t get the prime lesson Karl Marx taught us: There is a difference between use-value and exchange-value.

Communities, whether we’re talking about the people living in your yard, your circle of friends or some neat-o Web 2.0-thingy, can have tremendous use-value. This, obviously, is due to the fact that community enables a kind of social division of labor, and also because all communities create synergetic effects – there is no need for you to buy a belt-sander if your neighbor has one, and it’s much more convenient to use a friend as a babysitter than hire a stranger. One might even go so far as to say that the very nature of a community gives it a structural use-value, even though this will be realized somewhat differently in different communities. Obviously, we can imagine communities where the realized use-value is very small, possibly even zero, but it looks like basically all existing communities would generate use-value for those who partake in it. Just as obviously, this is the common sociological explanation for the very existence of communities – they are beneficial for their members.

However, does this mean that communities are valuable? Due to the fact that most people assume that value=value and that value=self-evident, there is a prevailing notion that communities would have extrinsic value, i.e. that they could be valued in the same way e.g. a company can. Here, we have the confusion between use-value and exchange-value in a relatively pure form. That the intrinsic use-value of a community would mean that it makes sense to price it and turn it into exchange-value – such as has happened in the case of MySpace and is happening in the case of YouTube – seems, as I said, a slightly schizophrenic move. To begin with, it is a confusion between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, the buying of the unbuyable. We could call it a mistranslation, where the interpersonal is valued from outside, by an individual egoist. But it also points to the very problem of assigning exchange-value in our post-industrial era. In a situation where one of the hottest commodities on the market derives its value from being seen as “this thing of ours” (as I would argue is the case with all online communities, a valuation that basically calls it “this thing of mine” seems almost psychotic.

Note that I am not claiming that those fine and upstanding capitalist that are busy acquiring online communities would be crazy, on the contrary. They are quite possibly making a very good deal (or not, the vagaries of such deals are the stuff of legend), but the logic of this deal is in a very real sense phantasmagoric. Effectively, they are buying two things which cannot be bought, trust and hipness, and betting on no-one getting on to them before they capitalize on their investment.

But if we are to truly gauge the value of online communities, such speculative investments can in no way be a reliable measure. Instead, we need to actually work with theories of value and try to think about what an online community is. And it is here that I would like to make a 180 degree turn, suggesting that maybe we can treat online communities not like any old commodity, but like a very specific commodity well theorized in e.g. Marx.

I would like to suggest that online communities are, in a sense, machines – that is, they are capital goods. Think about user-generated content. What is this but output from a very specific kind of machine? And think about what Marx said machines are: Crystallized labor. An online community like flickr takes the labor of its members and systematizes this into output, controlled by those who run the site. It might not be owned by them, but they control the way in which it is disseminated and processed, i.e. they control the means of production. Members in the community might believe that it is their cameras and their work that constitutes this means, but as internet pundits are so happy to point out, it is the system not the individual output that drives the enterprise. In this sense, the participatory work of people in online communities could well be interpreted as common labor (and please, let’s have none of this neo-nonsensical abstract labor crap), with the community itself representing a classic capital good. And these, as we well know, can be appraised, bought and sold on the market quite well.

The question this poses, however, is somewhat more disturbing: If a community can be bought and sold, is it a community? Are online communities, in fact, communities at all? After all, there can be a plethora of social feelings, interpersonal relations and the likes present in a factory or a slave camp. Yet, no-one in their right mind would call these places a “community of labor”. Or…?