More questions about productivity and free labor

I would like to call on the General Intellect of the class to try to get more of an answer to the question that was posed but never answered at the end of Tuesday’s class. This is especially for those who know their Marx better than I, which I figure is just about everyone reading this. If these questions fire up references or associations rather than clear answers, post these and I will do the exploring.

Mark’s question spoke to the issue of what is productive in what we might otherwise label as consumer behavior around consumption. It seems that a significant portion of what we are talking about as “immaterial labor” is the translation of various consumer behaviors into digitalized information. This generated data is valued by advertisers and by producers, for related but ultimately distinct reasons. Producers believe that this data will result in more or easier (i.e., less costly) sales. Advertisers believe that they can use this data to convince producers to buy more advertising. Ultimately it would up to the producers to make the empirical judgment as to whether or not this consumer data does really increase profits (either by generating more sales or by making sales less expensive to complete).

My question, then, is: what does Marxism have to say about this end stage of the capitalistic process, the behavior leading up to the actual purchase? Is producer profits the same, or essentially the same, as the extraction of surplus value that Marxism focuses on as one of the basic exploitations of capitalism?

Any process, whether via new media or not, that allows the capitalist to sell a product at a lower cost of production would result in greater profits for the producer. Does this mean that anything that I as a consumer do that contributes to lower a producer’s cost is, in some sense, “productive”? Is it “productive” if I shop on-line, allowing certain producers to bypass having to set up retail stores and the distribution and personnel costs associated with retail? This sort of “consumer choice” behavior seems somehow different from the more overt “free labor” in which someone engages in a behavior (without direct monetary compensation) that adds value to a product, such as an uncompensated webcam watcher “guarding” a nuclear plant. But are these two types of activities really different? Is the point that the structures of these new media systems we have been discussing make opting out of these free labor contributions virtually impossible (e.g., you generate usable data whether you want to or not)?

Or, if anyone would like to bring Stahl into this series of questions, can we reverse the “gametime” explanation (i.e., from warfare back to consumer capitalism) and say that new media systems embed (or seek to embed) everyone within their interactive systems so that they also “overcome the temporal space of ethical reflection”? Your own interactivity as a piece of the system becomes so much a part of who you are that “alienation” from free labor becomes a psychological impossibility—the free labor becomes part of who you are.