tripleC 17(1): 132-158, 2019 http://www.triple-c.at The Financial Logic of Internet Platforms: The Turnover Time of Money at the Limit of Zero Marcos Dantas Communication School, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil,
[email protected], www.marcosdantas.pro.br Abstract: In the first two sections of Capital, Volume 2, Marx examines the factors that pressure capital to reduce its circulation and turnover times at the limit of zero. By doing so, he shines a light on the role played by transportation and communications industries in the accumulation process and the reasons that these sectors are important frontiers of productive capital investment and surplus value extraction. This article suggests how the Internet’s social- digital platforms, such as Google, Facebook, Amazon and Airbnb, work according to the logic expounded by Marx, thus generating extraordinary profits for financial capital. Also, because of this Marxian logic, the main source of these huge platforms’ profits is the informational work done by millions of people who access these websites to engage in recreational activities or to meet the demands for goods and services in a Society of the Spectacle (Debord) subsumed into commodity fetishism. Keywords: capital turnover, unpaid work, surplus-value, socio-digital platforms, financial capital. Acknowledgement: The author thanks Gabriela Raulino, Nahema Barra de Oliveira, Rafael Evangelista, Sergio Amadeu and Tiago Tadeu for their comments and suggestions. Thanks also to the reviewers for their challenging comments. 1. Introduction It is equally a tendency of capital to make human labour (relatively) superfluous, so as to drive it, as human labour, towards infinity (Marx 1973/1939).