Workers-as-consumers: Rethinking the political economy of use-value and the reproduction of capital
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The relationship between the working class and consumer culture is undoubtedly contentious and often held as problematic in Marxist critical theory, owing to the exploitative nature of the mass production that facilitates consumption. Consequently, consumption sometimes appears as a distraction from the inequality perpetuated during the accumulation of capital, and thus as a social problem with normative undertones. As I reiterate in this article, however, workers are not simultaneously consumers because they have been inundated with consumer culture and advertising, but because they are separated from the means of production and must resort to exchange to reproduce their labour-power. As a result, they seek commodities as use-values, which is altogether different from a capitalist’s desire to realise exchange-value in the sale of commodities. This article is an attempt at examining the contradictions that arise in working-class interests in consumption, in order to illustrate why the act of consumption does not necessarily engender the continuous reproduction of capital, and thus of exploitation.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it