Social Forms Beyond Value: Public Wealth and Its Contradictions

Abstract

Revisiting the history of the development of software and communication technologies, this article demonstrates that while the early techno-utopian theories have been balanced by more sombre approaches, the emancipatory potential of productions whose outputs do not take the commodity form deserves further theoretical reflection. Social form and value-form literature provides a way to rethink publicly financed activities and activities of software communities as a variety of social forms of wealth and productions within capitalist social formations. Public wealth, it is argued, is a useful umbrella concept to approach the forms of wealth in the sphere of software, media and communication. With digitally storable matter, due to its replicability at near zero cost, it is of utmost importance that the state provides an institutional framework, primarily for capital, but also for public wealth, to be coded. In this setting, legal form, its content and function play a key role in the contested reproduction between forms of public wealth and capital.

Critical Sociology of Media and Communication: Connecting a Disconnected Field

“…The article also argues the need to democratise technology and offers potential ways forward. Based on the social form and value-form literature, Toni Prug and Mislav Žitko (2024) discuss social forms of production that are not governed by capital, such as free software production and communication. They develop the concept of public wealth to account for an array of social forms of wealth beyond the commodity form.…”