Value Production, Measurement, and Distribution under Digital Capitalism

Abstract

Western Marxist scholars take “immaterial labor,” “audience labor” and “prosumer labor” as the core categories to explain the problem of the value creation and profit sources of digital capital in online production and consumption activities in the Web 2.0 era. By analyzing the production process of digital capitalism, they have come to the conclusion that contemporary capitalist production has taken on an overall “novel” character. On the basis of the special cost structure of digital capitalist production, the increasing “fuzziness” of production time and living time, and the disappearance of the boundary between paid labor and unpaid labor under digital capitalism, they draw the conclusion that the law of value has become invalid in the era of “digital production and consumption.” However, once digital labor and its results are placed within Marx’s analytical framework, and are interpreted in terms of such categories as “direct production process of capitalism,” “fixed capital accumulation pattern” and “classification of productive labor and non-productive labor,” it becomes clear that the brilliant achievements of digital capital are best understood as the results of innovative modes of surplus-value possession or distribution, rather than of new methods of surplus-value creation, and that the conclusion that the law of value has failed represents a misreading or misinterpretation of Marx’s labor theory of value. Although the digital capitalist mode of production is serving partially to dissipate the role of the law of value, this law as the general principle regulating global capitalist production remains effective in the contemporary world.