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Is a camera a means of production, and a professional photographer, an entrepreneur, a capitalist?

To be, or not to be—that is the substance of it.
Is this my camera, this cunning device of glass and lead,
A means of production, a scepter for a king?
And am I, a poor player who struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
A capitalist, by this bauble made?
Or but a journeyman, who with his own two hands
Doth carve his meager feast from the unyielding stone?

Now, if a man aims to hold forth about «means of production» and «capitalists,» he’d best pick his tongue from one of the economic schools. Otherwise, he’s just making a noise.

Classical and Neoclassical Economic Theory

Their Story. The market, they say, is a self-polishing machine that always tries to find its balance. The main engine is a fellow looking out for his own hide, and everybody else doing the same, which they call competition. Price is just what folks are willing to pay and what others are willing to sell for. The old boys worried about wealth and value in the long run; the new ones fret over every little decision a buyer makes.

A Whack at Classical Theory ⬎

The Catch. The great weakness of this whole scheme is that it’s built on a prettier picture of the market than the Lord ever painted. It imagines a world full of little shops, all scrambling to please the customer. The reality is something else altogether.

Corporations and platforms these days don’t just listen for what you want; they tell you what you’re going to want. Giants like Apple or Google don't just fill orders; they build the very desire for their wares through powerful advertising and by owning the whole blamed town square. They’ve got the muscle to set prices and make the rules, acting less like players and more like the architects of the game.

The Government is no "night watchman"; it's the biggest customer in the shop. The old theory saw the government as a meddler in a "perfect" market. In truth, it's the one handing out the biggest contracts, writing the rulebook, and shaping whole industries with its subsidies and taxes. And seeing how big business has its boots under the table in every parliament, talking about the old-fashioned "left" and "unions" in the 21st century is enough to make a dog laugh.

Information isn't free and equal for all. The model of perfect competition assumes we all see the same hand of cards. In reality, the big corporations hold a deck the size of a barn door, packed with data about every one of us. This lets them not just guess what we might do, but to nudge us this way and that with their algorithms and targeted ads, like a farmer herding his sheep.

The Photographer in this scheme: In the capitalist order, a professional photographer is either a «small-time bourgeois» or, more colorfully, «a worker who exploits his own self.» If he works alone, he’s a two-man show in a one-man body: the exploited class (the proletarian, for he sells his labor) and the exploiting class (the bourgeois, for he owns the camera and pockets all the proceeds). The moment he hires assistants and pays them less than the value their sweat creates, he graduates to a full-fledged capitalist, pocketing the «leftover» value from his hired hands.

The Camera in this scheme: A camera is a classic «means of production.» It’s the tool the worker (the photographer) uses to work upon the «raw material» (God’s creation) to forge a finished product—a photograph, which has value you can use or trade. The whole worth of the picture is spun from the photographer’s labor; the camera just slowly donates little pieces of its own original cost to the final product, like a coat wearing thin at the elbows.

Marxism

Their Story. The tug-of-war between those who own the tools and those who have nothing but their sweat to sell can’t be settled without a move to a classless society, and a revolutionary jump is needed because the whole government works for the fellow who signs its checks. Slipping a parliament man some cash is corruption and is called a bribe. Its main difference from lobbying is that one is against the law and done in a dark alley, and the other is done in the open with fine cigars.

A Whack at Marxism ⬎

The Objections. All the non-Marxist theories take turns kicking at the foundations of the idea, and it generally looks like one of a few things:

They say the worker and the capitalist shake hands as free and equal men – there's no strong-arming, and the whole conflict is a fiction.
They allow there's a conflict, but say the government is there to referee it fair and square.
They claim you don't need a revolution to get to a more social system; you just need an "army of migrant laborers" and to ship your factories to poorer lands. But if you watch this play out, it’s the same old quarrel between the man with the tools and the man without, only now the folks back home get a temporary better deal.
They say the very split between "exploiters" and "exploited" is wrong, because the businessman thinks he serves the customer. But we know better – he serves the shareholders of the marketplace.

The answers to these jabs are mostly covered in my "Whack at Classical Theory" above. For my own part, I'll add that old Marx never foresaw the troubles a shrinking population would bring.

The Photographer in this scheme: (The description remains identical to the one in the Classical theory, for the Marxist view coincides here).

The Camera in this scheme: (The description remains identical to the one in the Classical theory).

The Austrian School

Their Story. The founder, Menger, wanted to prove that economics was a proper science, with laws as universal as gravity, and that these laws are rooted in the choices of a single man, not in grand historical tides or class interests. In effect, he created Praxeology – which studies the logic of human choice when a man is short on resources and long on uncertainty.

A Whack at the Austrian School ⬎

Its Limits. To be sure, the Marxists see this theory as a direct challenge to their whole enterprise. But I'd say the Austrian School today is less a theory and more of a method, which will have its uses in sorting through all this BIGDATA. Though it's unlikely Menger's own tools will be of much service; it'll be the mathematics of matrices that reveals the truth, first in a snapshot, and then in motion.

How do you calculate what a society truly needs in a product without the market's price tag? Stumbling before this question is what crippled the first attempts at a planned economy in the Soviet Union, and so on. It's possible that the tool of BIGDATA might just allow for such calculations.

The Photographer in this scheme: A photographer is first and foremost an entrepreneur. His main role isn’t so much in the making, but in seeing around the corner and satisfying needs folks didn’t know they had. He operates in a fog of uncertainty: guessing what style will be popular, finding his own little patch on the market, bearing the risks, and marshaling his resources (time, gear, advertising). His profit is the reward for seeing straight and clearing a path through that fog.

The Camera in this scheme: A camera is a «good of a higher order» (a means of production). But its value is entirely subjective and borrowed from the value that the final customers place on the photographs. Without the entrepreneur’s vision and the subjective tastes of his clients, the camera is just a useless heap of plastic and glass. It’s the tool in the entrepreneur’s hands to make his ideas real.

Institutionalism

Their Story. Institutionalism sees the friction between capital and labor as one of the main engines of economic development. But for an institutionalist, the question isn’t «how to wipe out the friction?» but «what rules, norms, and organizations can best manage this eternal squabble?» It often paints the state as a neutral referee who can even the odds in the fight.

A Whack at Institutionalism ⬎

The Problem. Institutionalism is good at describing how the rules change, but it doesn't give a satisfactory answer as to where this whole parade is headed. It has no final destination, except maybe "improving" the current system. What mechanisms, besides the hidden commercial interests of the capitalists, will push the state to be more social, is hard to say. But the schemes with pharma, transgenderism, and such are quite enlightening.

The Photographer in this scheme: A photographer is an actor on a stage built by a complex set of institutions. His behavior and success are shaped not just by his own sense, but by the rules of the game:

Formal institutions: Copyright law, taxes for the self-employed, business regulations, certification requirements for some jobs (like wedding photography).
Informal institutions: The unwritten «understandings» in the professional community about pricing, ethics, what’s in fashion; the trust between a photographer and his client.

The Camera in this scheme: A camera isn’t just a means of production; it’s an asset, and the rights to own it and what it makes are clearly defined by institutions. The value of the camera and the pictures it takes depends entirely on the strength of the institution of copyright. Without it, the photos could be stolen with impunity, and the commercial value of the photographer’s work would be next to nothing. So, the means of production are not so much a fact, but a bundle of property rights, which are determined by laws and social norms. The conflict in society is less a battle between labor and capital, and more a scrap between different interest groups (business, unions, the state, lobbyists) over who gets to influence these very rules.

The Theory of Post-Industrial/Information Society

Their Story. Propounded by Daniel Bell and company, it claims that developed countries are shifting from the industrial age to a new, post-industrial one. Its main points boil down to this:

Information and knowledge become the main wellspring of innovation and the driving force of politics, shoving aside old-timers like land or labor.
The economic center of gravity moves from making things to providing services, research, education, and improving the quality of life.
The fastest-growing tribe is the technical specialists and professionals—the knowledge-bearers, who form a new «intellectual class.»
The main type of work becomes people dealing with other people (service), not a man wrestling with a machine.

A Whack at the Information Society ⬎

The Practice. In practice, information became a new thing to own, and platforms—the means to control it. Big corporations built monopolies on data. A photographer on stock websites turned into a digital craftsman, juggling five professions at once: up to half his time is spent on unpaid work creating metadata.

The platforms shifted the costs onto the creators, saving on editors. Their commissions reached 70-85% while they invested precisely nothing in the content. These platforms operate globally, using the difference in living standards and labor laws between countries to keep their costs down and their profits up. A new form of exploitation has sprung up, where global inequality allows for super-profits. But then, digital tools have only been a catalyst and an amplifier for trends that were already there.

The root of the trouble:
Digitalization created the illusion that every process can be measured. Management systems (in government, in corporations) started demanding digital trails for accountability. A teacher must not just teach, but generate data (filled-in electronic gradebooks, reports) to prove he's working. The actual, substantive work becomes a "black box," and its digital shadow—the only reality the system acknowledges.

In the digital economy, data becomes a valuable asset. The work of a doctor, a teacher, a scientist is valuable not only for its direct result (a healed patient, an educated student) but also for the metrics it generates. This data is used for optimization, prediction, resource allocation, and profit. The specialist becomes an unpaid supplier of raw material for big data.

Digital technology allows for the replacement of professional trust with continuous auditing. They used to trust the teacher with the process of teaching. Now the system demands a daily digital report, because an algorithm cannot be trusted with a man, but it can be trusted to control a man. This breeds a culture of "total accountability," where only what can be presented as a file or a number has any value.

Just like in the factory, where the worker is alienated from the product of his labor, the digital specialist is alienated from the meaning of his activity. His real work (to heal, to teach, to create) shifts towards servicing interfaces—filling out forms, inputting data, complying with platform regulations. This is a second-order alienation—alienation not only from the result, but from the very process of labor itself.

Why digitalization makes it worse:
It masks inefficiency. Creating reports looks like work, though it's a simulation. The digital accounting system becomes the goal, and the real activity (teaching, healing)—just a means to fill the system with data. Digital systems create the illusion of total control, spawning endless demands for documentation, the creation of which is also "work." All this was going on back in the days of Schweik.

The Upshot: Digitalization didn't create this problem from scratch, but it took it to a whole new level. The bureaucratic logic of management, which wants to measure and control everything, found in digital technology the perfect tool for its total spread. As a result, where there was once a creative process, its digital double now appears—and it's working with this double that is slowly crowding out the original activity.

The concept, developed by Manuel Castells, of a "networked" society replacing the old class stratification, in practice, turns into a strengthening of the power of platform-middlemen. They become new centralized structures that set the rules of the game for all network participants (sellers and buyers, creators and viewers), extracting a rent from this position.

The Photographer in this scheme: A creative entrepreneur, blending the roles of an intellectual worker and an organizer. When he hires assistants, he becomes a micro-capitalist of the creative economy.

The Camera in this scheme: An intellectual amplifier, not a classic means of production. The main productive resource is the photographer’s knowledge and creativity. The primary value is created through information and symbolic content, not through physical means.

Keynesianism

Their Story. The Great Depression of the 1930s showed up the ideas of a quick market self-recovery as a sham. A path was needed within the existing world order. The gist of Keynes’s idea is that the state should actively manage demand through fiscal and monetary policy. In practice, this means tax cuts, handing out easy credit, and money in general. The heyday of Keynesianism came after the Second World War.

A Whack at Keynesianism ⬎

The Hangover. The 21st century brought new opportunities for financial games. And the cheap money, handed out by Central Banks with an eye on the real sector, flowed into the financial market. For obvious reasons—capital "wants" to grow by itself, and that's how it happens faster. This led to new macroeconomic imbalances, a gap between the poor and the owners of assets, and to inflation (especially after the pandemic stimulus).

A consequence of the Keynesian dance is state support for "dead" companies in terms of efficiency, which kills the "creative destruction" of the market organism and infantilizes the population and business, making them dependent on government aid. The general trend is this: food stamps worth about $120 a month were received in 2023 by 42 million citizens out of 340, while in 1994 it was 28 million out of 250.

Keynesianism is effective as "first aid" for stopping an economic collapse and turning it into a "managed decline."

The Photographer in this scheme: A photographer is, on the one hand, a consumer, and on the other—a small business, whose well-being directly depends on the aggregate demand in the economy.
In a boom (high aggregate demand), people and companies have money for weddings, corporate events, ad campaigns—demand for the photographer’s services grows.
During a crisis (low aggregate demand), his services are one of the first things households and businesses cut. He can face unemployment, even though he’s a professional.

The Camera in this scheme: A camera is a tool for extracting income, whose usefulness is unstable and depends on the macroeconomic weather. For a Keynesian, the key question is not what the camera is in itself, but how to ensure such a level of aggregate demand in the economy that the photographer has enough clients to make using this camera worthwhile. It is an object of investment, whose return is cyclical.

In Conclusion

Every economic theory offers its own spyglass to look at the modern professional. Marxism lays bare the contradictions, neoclassicals paint a harmony, the Austrians see an entrepreneur, the institutionalists see a player by the rules, and the post-industrial theory sees a creator in a digital field.

Choosing your lens isn’t just an academic pastime. It’s a matter of conscience. What sits closer to your own heart: seeing the economy as a battlefield or a collaborative venture? Do you trust that the free market rewards a man’s merits fairly, or are you convinced it just perpetuates inequality? Do you see digital platforms as the liberators of creativity or its new taskmasters?

Let conscience be your guide as to which set of spectacles describes reality more truly and points the way to a fairer society. In the end, the economic creed you choose dictates not only how you see the world, but how you mean to act in it.

Respectfully Yours,
Kirill Toll’

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