ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that Facebook is a capitalist social media giant that exploits users' digital labor, commodifies personal data, fosters financialization, undermines capital taxation and the public interest, is part of a surveillance-industrial complex, fosters an uncritical and one-dimensional engaging/connecting/sharing-ideology, and is a machine for the production and reproduction of the neoliberal self. The critique of the political economy of global media giants is useful not just for its critique of media capital, however, but also as a way to understand various expressions of underlying capital/labor contradictions and also as a way to reflect upon and support the potential for class struggle and alternatives to a capitalist media world. Facebook is an expression of the contradictions of communication in capitalism. It shows how social life under capitalist relations serves particular profit interests that monetarily benefit single individuals. As an alternative, digital class struggle is a political strategy that aims at creating a non-capitalist, commons-based Internet.
