Vol. 8. No. 2: Special Issue on Capitalist Crisis, Communication & Culture
Edited by Christian Fuchs, Matthias Schafranek, David Hakken, Marcus Breen
http://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/issue/current

Suggested citation: Fuchs, Christian, Matthias Schafranek, David Hakken and Marcus Breen. Eds. 2010. Special issue on “Capitalist crisis, communication & culture“. tripleC (cognition, communication, co-operation): Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society 8 (2): 193-309.

“Capitalism […] is approaching an apocalyptic zero-point” (Slavoj Žižek).

What is the role of communication in the general situation of capitalist crisis?
The global economic downturn is an indicator of a new worldwide capitalist crisis. The main focus of most public debates as well as of economic and policy analyses is the role of finance capital and the housing market in creating the crisis, less attention is given to the role of communication technologies, the media, and culture in the world economic crisis. The task of this special issue of tripleC is to present analyses of the role of ICTs, the media, and culture in the current crisis of capitalism. The seven papers focus on the causes, development, and effects of the crisis. Each paper relates one or more of these dimensions to ICTs, the media, or culture.

Capitalist Crisis, Communication, & Culture – Introduction to the Special Issue of tripleC
Christian Fuchs, Matthias Schafranek, David Hakken and Marcus
Breen (Special Issue Editors)
pp 193-204
http://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/228/189

Computing and the Current Crisis:
The Significant Role of New Information Technologies in Our Socio-Economic Meltdown
David Hakken
pp 205-220
http://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/161/193

The Virtual Debt Factory: Towards an Analysis of Debt and Abstraction in the American Credit Crisis
Vincent R. Manzerolle
pp 221-236
http://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/149/192

Calculating the Unknown. Rationalities of Operational Risk in Financial Institutions
Matthias Werner and Hajo Greif
pp 237-250
http://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/184/194

Crisis, What Crisis? The Media: Business and Journalism in Times of Crisis
Rosario de Mateo, Laura Bergés, Anna Garnatxe*
pp 251-274
http://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/212/195

Anglo-American Credit Scoring and Consumer Debt in the Subprime Mortgage Crisis of 2007 as Models for Other Countries?
Thomas Ruddy
pp 275-284
http://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/176/198

Crise, Genre et TIC : Recette pour une Dés-Union Pronon- cée. L’Exemple de l’Afrique du Sud
(in French)
Joelle Palmieri
pp 285-309
http://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/141/197

The power elite – large corporations, governments, and military institutions –distinguishes itself from ordinary citizens and most civil society organizations by two features: these actors have a lot of economic and political power, which allows them to strongly shape our world. They also have the resources to keep parts of their activities invisible. Therefore for example corporate crime frequently remains undetected. The topic that made the news about WikiLeaks in late July 2010 was that the platform published more than 90 000 top-secret documents (reports of soldiers about operations, protocols of surveillance operations, etc) from American military sources about military operations in Afghanistan.

According to news sources (Der Spiegel, 30/2010, pp. 70-86), the documents:

- show that and how special command forces like the US Task Force 373 have killed enemies that are defined on death lists
- document failed operations (including death of civilians)
- document that the Americans and their allies are facing serious problems in the military conflict with the Taliban and Al Qaeda
- document that unmanned fighter drones used in Afghanistan are error prone and have had many accidents

Following the leak of the Afghanistan documents, US government representatives and conservative commentators heavily criticized WikiLeaks and Julian Assange. US National Security Adviser General James Jones said that WikiLeaks “could put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk, and threaten our national security”. Mike Millen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, commented that WikiLeaks “might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family”. Marc Thiessen, a former speech writer for George W. Bush, argued in the Washington Post that WikiLeaks “is a criminal enterprise”, constitutes “material support for terrorism”, and that the “Web site must be shut down and prevented from releasing more documents – and its leadership brought to justice” .

Such statements are strongly twisting reality. They are ideology at its purest. War is always about killing the enemy. In Afghanistan, US soldiers and their allies kill military enemies and, as is known not only since the WikiLeaks documents, this has also resulted in numerous civilian casualties, and Al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters kill US and allied soldiers as well as Afghan civilians by suicide attacks. This double-sided violence has created a spiral of attacks and counter-attacks that sadly has caused many casualties. Violence is not caused by the materials published by WikiLeaks that document violence, it is caused by the military conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq themselves. One gets the impression that the US government thinks that military violence does not exist if it is unknown. One is reminded here of the US coverage of anti-Iraq war protests in many US mainstream media, where the protesters were described with terms such as anarchists, violent mob, vandals, rioters, mayhem, chaos, aggressive, etc and the impression was invoked that the main violent problem is not the war itself, but those protesting against the war.

The truth about the WikiLeaks Afghanistan documents is that the platform has the potential to make visible the scale of brutality, violence, and horror of warfare and military conflicts. To uncover and document such realities is uncomfortable for those powerful actors, who want to twist reality by making what really happened in the daily reality of war, corporate crime, and corporate and government corruption unknown. WikiLeaks is a project that makes unknown reality known, it transforms that which is kept secret and invisible by governments and corporations into visible reality.  WikiLeaks can be seen as an alternative media project: it tries to provide information that uncovers the misuse of power by powerful actors, it is an Internet-based medium that enables critiques of power structures.

Power is based on a dialectic of visibility and invisibility: powerful actors want to make their enemies and opponents visible, while they want to remain themselves invisible. They engage in surveillance in order to make visible and in order to keep their own operations and gathered information invisible. Power is always related to making information about enemies and opponents visible, while at the same time making and keeping the collected information intransparent, inaccessible, and secret. WikiLeaks cuts into the power dialectic of visibility of the surveilled and invisibility of the powerful by helping to make invisible power structures visible. This is itself a process of power-making and power-generation because these are processes that try to force visibility on the powerful. WikiLeaks engages in watching the powerful by making their operations and the information gathered by surveillance operations of the powerful visible. During the Vietnam war, television made visible the horror of the killing fields that would have otherwise remained invisible. In a similar fashion, WikiLeaks has made visible hidden and secret realities of warfare today.

WikiLeaks is not politically value-free and neutral in its operations, but no journalist and no medium is neutral, but rather always politically biased because how things are reported, what is not reported, which priority is given to certain stories, which quotation by which person is mentioned first in a story, how often a certain opinion is mentioned in a story, how advertising and funding influences the basic framework of a medium, etc are all political biases. Therefore the publication of the Afghanistan documents on WikiLeaks is certainly a political move intended to help putting and end to the war in Afghanistan. It is political in the same sense that any news article and any TV news report about the Afghan report carries political messages, interests, and intentions. It is politically honest when Julian Assange talks openly about his anti-war motivations in an interview with Der Spiegel: “This material shines light on the everyday brutality and squalor of war. The archive will change public opinion and it will change the opinion of people in positions of political and diplomatic influence. […] There is a mood to end the war in Afghanistan. This information won’t do it alone, but it will shift political will in a significant manner. […] The most dangerous men are those who are in charge of war. And they need to be stopped”. Political honesty is a virtue that many politicians and newsmakers are all too often missing.

Of course it could happen that WikiLeaks publishes fake material. But this can happen and does happen in any mass medium. There are no reasons to assume that it should happen more often on WikiLeaks than in corporate mass media. To the contrary, WikiLeaks does not have the advertising and financial pressure characteristic for the corporate mass media that Chomsky and Herman have characterized as propagandistic filters that distort news reporting. Therefore one should be less concerned about manipulated information on WikiLeaks than one should be concerned about media manipulation in the corporate mass media.

WikiLeaks defines itself in its self-description first of all as a liberal project that protects freedom of speech and tries to strengthen democracy by making government corruption visible: “WikiLeaks is a multi-jurisdictional public service designed to protect whistleblowers, journalists and activists who have sensitive materials to communicate to the public. […] We believe that transparency in government activities leads to reduced corruption, better government and stronger democracies. All governments can benefit from increased scrutiny by the world community, as well as their own people. We believe this scrutiny requires information. Historically that information has been costly – in terms of human life and human rights. But with technological advances – the internet, and cryptography – the risks of conveying important information can be lowered. […] We believe that it is not only the people of one country that keep their government honest, but also the people of other countries who are watching that government. That is why the time has come for an anonymous global avenue for disseminating documents the public should see” (WikiLeaks self-description).

The problem of the WikiLeak self-description is that in the first third of the text, only documenting government corruption is mentioned, whereas documenting corporate irresponsibility and corporate crimes is not. This creates the impression that corrupt governments are the main problem of our world, but not also or not even more corrupt and criminal corporations. The document in its first third conveys a liberal impression that talks about the problems of big government and at the same time – or even by doing so – ignores the problems of capitalism. Fortunately the self-description then takes a twist in a section titled “Does WikiLeaks support corporate whistleblowers?”, where the need for documenting corporate crimes and corporate irresponsibility is discussed:

“It is increasingly obvious that corporate fraud must be effectively addressed. Corporate corruption comes in many forms. […] The number of employees and turnover of some corporations exceeds the population and GDP of some nation states. When comparing countries, after observations of population size and GDP, it is usual to compare the system of government, the major power groupings and the civic freedoms available to their populations. Such comparisons can also be illuminating in the case of corporations. […] While having a GDP and population comparable to Belgium, Denmark or New Zealand, many of these multi-national corporations have nothing like their quality of civic freedoms and protections. This is even more striking when the regional civic laws the company operates under are weak (such as in West Papua, many African states or even South Korea); there, the character of these corporate tyrannies is unobscured by their civilizing surroundings. Through governmental corruption, political influence, or manipulation of the judicial system, abusive corporations are able to gain control over the defining element of government — the sole right to deploy coercive force” (WikiLeaks self-description).

So WikiLeaks fortunately finally makes clear that it explicitly is not only a government watchdog, but also a corporate watchdog. But the first time that corporations are mentioned at all and at the same time mentioned as governments comes relatively late in the document, namely in the passage which says that the “power of principled leaking to embarrass governments, corporations and institutions is amply demonstrated through recent history” (WikiLeaks self-description).

The problem that remains is that in the WikiLeaks self-description, corporate crimes and corporate corruption are only mentioned late, whereas government power is mentioned in the second paragraph. Another problem is the assumption that it is possible to civilize corporations:

“WikiLeaks endeavors to civilize corporations by exposing uncivil plans and behavior. Just like a country, a corrupt or unethical corporation is a menace to all inside and outside it” (WikiLeaks self-description). One can hear daily stories about corporate irresponsibility: stories such as the one that British Petrol caused one of the worst ecological disasters are in all news, that iPods and iPads are produced in China under inhumane conditions by workers who commit suicide because they cannot stand the working conditions, etc cannot be overheard in the media, there are daily stories about child labour, precarious labour conditions, etc. The problem is that such a multitude of stories, and WikiLeaks here is no exception and directly admits this in its self-description, makes us believe that corporate irresponsibility and corporate crimes against humanity are the exception from the rule and can therefore be fixed within capitalism by “civilizing corporations”. But what if corporations are uncivilized as such, if their behaviour is always exploitative and irresponsible? Then capitalism and corporations cannot be civilized, and exposing uncivil plans and behaviour should be aimed at transforming and civilizing the whole.

I applaud the critical political potential of WikiLeaks as corporate and government-Internet watchdog, but think that WikiLeaks’s self-description and self-understanding should be changed as soon as possible.

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is quoted saying: “The concept that the world will be better if you share more is something that’s pretty foreign to a lot of people – and it runs into all these privacy concerns”. He acknowledges that some people have “the vision of a surveillance world”. But he associates Google, not Facebook with surveillance. He says that Google’s strategy of data collection “is a little scary” and thinks that Facebook in contrast gives users control over their data. “Given that the world is moving towards more sharing of information, making sure that it happens in a bottom-up way, with people inputting the information themselves and having control over how their information interacts with the system, as opposed to a centralized way, through it being tracked in some surveillance system”.

Zuckerberg has repeatedly said that he does not care about profit, but wants to help people with Facebook’s tools and wants to create an open society. Kevin Colleran, Facebook advertising sale executive, says in the Wired story that “Mark is not motivated by money”. In a story by the Times (October 20, 2008, http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/technology/article4974197.ece), Zuckerberg said: “The goal of the company is to help people to share more in order to make the world more open and to help promote understanding between people. The long-term belief is that if we can succeed in this mission then we also be able to build a pretty good business and everyone can be financially rewarded. […] The Times: Does money motivate you. Zuckerberg: No”.

Zuckerberg thinks that the only problem about Facebook surveillance is that other individuals get access to images or information of users that is not meant for being available to them. He also thinks that privacy control options will solve this problem. Facebook has tended to make ever more information available to all users as its standard setting. One cannot assume that all users are highly skilful in setting their privacy options. Zuckerberg ignores the skills divide in social networking site usage.

But the more crucial problem is that Zuckerberg fully ignores the economic power structures of the modern economy, into which Facebook is embedded. If Zuckerberg really does not care about profit, why is Facebook then not a non-commercial platform and why does it use targeted advertising? The problems of targeted advertising are that it aims at controlling and manipulating human needs, that users are normally not asked if they agree to the use of advertising on the Internet, but have to agree to advertising if they want to use commercial platforms (lack of democracy), that advertising can increase market concentration, that it is intransparent for most users what kind of information about them is used for advertising purposes, and that users are not paid for the value creation they engage in when using commercial web 2.0 platforms and uploading data. Surveillance on Facebook is not only an interpersonal process, where users view data about other individuals that might benefit or harm the latter, it is primarily economic surveillance, i.e. the collection, storage, assessment, and commodification of personal data, usage behaviour, and user-generated data for economic purposes. Facebook and other web 2.0 platforms are large advertising-based capital accumulation machines that achieve their economic aims by economic surveillance.

Facebook collects information about user behaviour on other sites for economic purposes: “We may ask advertisers to tell us how our users responded to the ads we showed them (and for comparison purposes, how other users who didn’t see the ads acted on their site). This data sharing, commonly known as ‘conversion tracking,’ helps us measure our advertising effectiveness and improve the quality of the advertisements you see. We may receive information about whether or not you’ve seen or interacted with certain ads on other sites in order to measure the effectiveness of those ads“ (Privacy Policy, April 22, 2010).

Facebook targets advertisement to individual users by surveilling their usage behaviour and interests: “We allow advertisers to choose the characteristics of users who will see their advertisements and we may use any of the non-personally identifiable attributes we have collected (including information you may have decided not to show to other users, such as your birth year or other sensitive personal information or preferences) to select the appropriate audience for those advertisements. For example, we might use your interest in soccer to show you ads for soccer equipment, but we do not tell the soccer equipment company who you are. […] We occasionally pair advertisements we serve with relevant information we have about you and your friends to make advertisements more interesting and more tailored to you and your friends. For example, if you connect with your favorite band’s page, we may display your name and profile photo next to an advertisement for that page that is displayed to your friends. We only share the personally identifiable information visible in the social ad with the friend who can see the ad. You can opt out of having your information used in social ads on this help page” (Privacy Policy, April 22, 2010).

Zuckerberg and Facebook ignore concerns about advertising settings. Facebook’s privacy policy is the living proof that Facebook is primarily about profit-generation by advertising. “The world will be better if you share more“? For whom, Mark Zuckerberg? “Sharing” on Facebook in economic terms means primarily that Facebook “shares” information with advertising clients. And “sharing” is only the euphemism for selling and commodifying data. Facebook commodifies and trades user data and user behaviour data. Facebook does not make the world a better place, it makes the world a more commercialized place, a big shopping mall without exit. It makes the world only a better place for companies interested in advertising, not for users.

Mr. Zuckerberg, if you are a man who stands by his word, and Facebook for you is really not about profit, then please abolish targeted advertising and any kind of advertising on Facebook tomorrow and transform Facebook into a non-commercial, non-profit Internet platform. Yours truly, Christian Fuchs.

Global warming would be related to energy supply. The USA, which account for 5% of the world population, account for 25% of carbon emissions. What Jeremy Leggett calls the empire of oil and transport would be important influencing factors. Zygmunt Bauman argues that mobility is one of the most important values today and that it is an unequally distributed commodity. Urry stressed especially that neoliberalism has generated new forms of mobility that have generated an excesses that have caused high carbon consumption.

As a result, sociology would have to take the future more serious than in the past and there would be a need for sociology to imagine alternative futures. Alternative systems would be needed. Potential negative scenarios for future society would for example be oil, gas, and water wars and the restriction of travel to the super-rich. Nicholas Stern, an anti-neoliberal thinker, has argued that climate change is the greatest market failure. The problem according to Urry is that 20th century capitalism has generated unprecedented levels of carbon emissions.

I liked about this talk that John Urry abstracted a specific problem and analyzed it within its societal and capitalist context. He gave a realistic and materialistic analysis. In comparison, Castells – who covered another issue (the network society), but nonetheless a comparison in respect to the means of analysis can be made – did not see capitalist development as a problem and was not much concerned with problems of current and future society and the role of the economy. Urry talked about the need for alternative systems and an interventionist sociology, whereas Castells was keen to draw a separating line between political action and sociology and was mainly concerned about the development of new sociological methods for the future of sociology. It is alarming that someone, who is considered as one of the most important sociologists by many, is mainly talking about new rigorous research methods and not about global societal problems when addressing the future of sociology in a society that is full of global problems. John Urry’s talk differed radically in this respect.

I discovered and found interest in John Urry’s work on “Global Complexity” some years ago, when in the EU-funded research project “Human Strategies on Complexity”, I tried to apply the notion of self-organization that we had developed in the project to the phenomenon of globalization (”Globalization and Self-Organization in the Knowledge-Based Society“). I found interesting the connection of social theory and complexity theory that Urry has made because I have also had a comparable endeavour in the past 8 years, which has resulted in my recent book. I lost sight of Urry’s work in the past years. His talk given in Barcelona has renewed my interest in reading some of his works that have ever since been published.

One question remained unanswered for me: Does building new systems only mean to establish new forms of consumption, or does this also involve the need for new economic forms of production? Mobility based on neoliberally caused excesses today surely not only means that people move globally, but also that commodities move globally because the practice of globally outsourcing and diffusing production has become so common in order to reduce capital investment costs (constant and variable capital in Marxian terms). For me the primary problem concerning travel is not personal travel by private people, but commodity transport and business-related travel. Also according to statistics energy production itself is the highest source of carbon emissions today, not transport. It might not suffice to change consumption, there might be a need to find alternatives to capitalist production. A pure focus on consumption could even distort the analysis of the importance of the role of production. I did not get from the talk in how far what Urry was saying about the problems’ causes and building alternative systems is related to production as well.

In the final plenary session, Michael Burawoy spoke about “Whose Knowledge? Varieties of Public Sociology”. He distinguished four types of sociology: Professional sociology is instrumental in producing knowledge and addresses an academic audience. Policy sociology produces knowledge for a client external to the academic system. Critical sociology is reflexive and tries to provide alternative foundations to sociology. Especially value foundations are discussed. Public sociology engages in dialogue with publics. The typology based on the distinction between academic and non-academic audiences and instrumental and reflexive knowledge. The latter is taken from Horkheimer and Adorno. Burawoy added another dimension: Gramsci’s distinction between traditional and organic intellectuals. Traditional intellectuals would address the public with the help of public media such as newspapers, whereas organic intellectuals would have unmediated relations to the public and would conduct a more activist type of sociology. As examples for traditional public sociologists, Burawoy mentioned Bourdieu, Mills, and Giddens, as examples for organic public sociologists; Gramsci, Freire, Touraine, and feminism. He concluded by arguing that all four types of sociology are important and should be connected and that his work has focused on building space and acceptance for critical and public sociology within sociology.

Alberto Martinelli, a former ISA president, criticized Burawoy. He argued that Burawoy sometimes makes a clear hierarchy between the four types. The most important form would then be public sociology, followed by critical sociology, professional sociology, and policy sociology. The latter would then be presented as corrupted by money and power. Martinelli called such a distinction fundamentalist and saw the focus on subordinate groups as rather dangerous. There would be dangers of dogmatism, elitism, and vanguardism. Martinelli stressed the importance of policy sociology and called for a connection of sociology to the natural sciences.

Alain Touraine on the one hand argued that it is important to defend the autonomy of sociology because it would have been distorted and limited by ideological interests in the past. Sociology would have to be protected from ideology. But contemporary society would be dominated by violence, war, and an extreme gap between the rich and the poor. Therefore on the other hand a second type of sociology would be needed, one that defends human rights for all. Sociology would have to uncover and eliminate the presence of hell in society. Sociologist would be responsible for the whole world and society would be full of forces that destroy human rights. Sociology would have to connect to the new generation that is eager to intervene and attack. This should be accompanied by the necessary reconstruction of many concepts of sociology. Touraine’s statements were closer to Burawoy than to Martinelli.

The debate showed that the issues that were underlying the positivism dispute between Popper and Adorno in German sociology in the early 1960s, are still at the core of discussions on the current and future state of sociology more than 45 years later. There are some who want to directly connect sociology to social struggles and the problems of the time, whereas others (including not only Martinelli, but in my opinion also Castells) claim that sociology can and should be neutral and value-free.

For me, Burawoys position is good, but not radical enough. He argues that public sociology has no intrinsic normative valences and that it can also be conducted in the interest of Christian fundamentalism. Burawoy bases his distinction between instrumental and reflexive knowledge on Horkheimer and Adorno. But for Horkheimer (in essays like “Traditionelle und kritische Theorie” or “Zur Kritik der instrumentellen Vernunft”) the distinction was between instrumental and critical knowledge. The latter is a specific form of normative knowledge, it operates according to Horkheimer with categories such as class, exploitation, surplus value, profit, misery, and breakdown, and is oriented on a “society without injustice”, “man’s emancipation from slavery”, and “the happiness of all individuals”. Therefore Horkheimer would consider a sociology conducted in the interest of Christian fundamentalism always as an instrumental type of sociology and would argue for a left-wing sociology. So in my opinion Burawoy should either drop his reference to Horkheimer or reformulate his concept of public sociology as critical public sociology. In my opinion Burawoy has a too positive picture of NGOs, the public sphere, and civil society. NGOs frequently support also conservative values. And the public is not automatically rational and willing to discuss, especially under neoliberal conditions, where people first of all have to struggle to survive and might not find the time and energy needed for engaging in public discourse. Horkheimer: “It is possible for the consciousness of every social stratum today to be limited and corrupted by ideology, however much, for its circumstances, it may be bent on truth. For all its insight into the individual steps in social change and for all the agreement of its elements with the most advanced traditional theories, the critical theory has no specific influence on its side, except con¬cern for the abolition of social injustice”. In my opinition, public sociology means a public interest sociology, a sociology that defends public interests, i.e. provides intellectual means and arguments for establishing conditions that benefit all. An such a public defense should also be made, if there is no or only a small critical public. When speaking about public intellectuals, my first example would be Marx, and my second, and most important one, Herbert Marcuse.

Also political reforms of society, the political system, the economy, and the public sphere might be needed. Civil society alone is not enough. It needs to be combined with progressive institutional politics. Public sociology has to confront the situation of a disinterested public and the role of ideology in public life. Burawoy hardly gives attention to these phenomena. Public sociology should not be seen as a solution to all problems, it has many difficulties. If I were to describe myself as being a public academic due to my intellectual and political engagement in the basic income movement, then I would mainly reflect about the difficulties involved, the notion of a limited public with limited consciousness, limited resources, etc. Failure and defeat are permanent features of civil society under contemporary conditions. Civil society also has a role of legitimating domination, as Gramsci already knew. This can for example be seen in the outsourcing of welfare functions from the state to civil society under neoliberal political conditions. Burawoy’s picture of civil society is too idealistic. Nonetheless his typology is very important because it has started a debate in sociology that could open up new spaces for critical, radical, and progressive theories and studies.