Does the digital sector produce surplus value? The case of Facebook

Download

1173-6986-2-PB.pdf

Date

2020-12

Author

Tonak, E. Ahmet

Metadata

Show full item record

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Item Usage Stats

307
views

262
downloads

This article shows that the digital economy can, as opposed to the opinion of many, be analysed on the basis of Marx’s theory of surplus value and profit. What we have shown through a study of the political economy of Facebook is that the product produced by the company in question is a commodity just like others. Moreover, the surplus value produced by the productive workers of Facebook is the main source of the profits of the company and the wages of its unproductive workers.

Subject Keywords

Digital economy, Facebook, Surplus value, Immaterial labor, Labor theory of value

URI

http://www2.feas.metu.edu.tr/metusd/ojs/index.php/metusd/article/view/1173
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/93227

Journal

ODTÜ Gelişme Dergisi

Collections

Department of Political Science and Public Administration, Article

Suggestions

OpenMETU
Core

Does foreign portfolio investment strengthen stock-commodity markets connection? ORDU AKKAYA, BEYZA MİNA; Soytaş, Uğur (Elsevier BV, 2020-03-01) The heavy influx of financial institutions into commodity markets is referred to as financialization of commodities and this phenomenon argues that financial institutions increase the connectedness between commodity and stock markets through simultaneous investing. In this paper, employing Treasury International Capital data by US Treasury to proxy for institutional investment, we investigate the role of foreign portfolio investors on increasing spillovers between commodity and stock markets. We include dev...
Does Credit Composition have Asymmetric Effects on Income Inequality? New Evidence from Panel Data Seven, Ünal; Kilinc, Dilara; Coskun, Yener (MDPI AG, 2018-9-25) This paper studied the effects of credit to private non-financial sectors on income inequality. In particular, we focused on the distinction between household and firm credits, and investigated whether these two types of credit had adverse effects on income inequality. Employing cross-section augmented cointegrating regressions and using balanced panel data for 30 developed and developing countries over the period from 1995 to 2013, we showed that firm credit reduced income inequality, whereas there was no ...
Is there an interest rate channel for monetary policy in Turkey? Erdoğan, Seyfettin; Yıldırım, Durmuş Çağrı (Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi (Ankara, Turkey), 2010-12) The changes in monetary authority’s decisions may affect the behavior of economic agents and thus the level of aggregate demand. Namely; a change in the short term interest rate is made by the central bank directly affects the user cost of capital and firms’ decisions about investment expenditure. In the monetary policy literature, this mentioned process is defined as the interest rate channel. To guide policy makers it is important to investigate whether interest rate channel operates. Determination of the...
Is currency seigniorage exogenous for inflation tax in Turkey? Özmen, Erdal (1998-04-01) This paper discusses the implications of the validity of the conditioning hypothesis for the maintained money demand equation for an inflation tax analysis. We also test the validity of the quantity-theoretical inflation tax model for the post-1980 quarterly Turkish data by using Johansen cointegration techniques. The results suggest that the tax rate (inflation) is weakly exogenous for the parameters of the long-run money demand (tax base) equation. This result, consistent with a Keynesian endogenous seign...
Effect of innovation on wages, profits, and labor turnover in Turkish manufacturing Ekiz, Çiğdem; Taymaz, Erol; Department of Economics (2022-9) Innovations are among the main factors that influence long-term economic growth and affect important economic indicators such as profits and wages. Changes in profits and wages, in turn, determine the distribution of income in a society. This thesis analyzes the effects of innovation on wages, profits, and labor turnover. Changes in wages after innovations for high-wage, median-wage, and low-wage earners and male and female workers are first considered. Subsequently, changes in profits and labor productivit...

Citation Formats

E. A. Tonak, “Does the digital sector produce surplus value? The case of Facebook,” ODTÜ Gelişme Dergisi, vol. 47, no. 2, pp. 281–289, 2020, Accessed: 00, 2021. [Online]. Available: http://www2.feas.metu.edu.tr/metusd/ojs/index.php/metusd/article/view/1173.