The Digital Labour Theory of Value and Karl Marx in the Age of Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Weibo

Abstract

The labour theory of value is one of the core tenets of Marx's theory of historical materialism, and of his understanding of capitalism. It is the theory that connects value to class structure, and that unveils the exploitative social relations that lay behind prices of commodities. It is therefore obvious why contemporary scholars interested in Marxian theory would be keen on finding out to what extent Marx's categories still stand and to what extent they need to be modified to reflect contemporary realities.Stating that the source of capital, and the motor for its accumulation, is labour, and labour only, the labour theory of value is of continued contemporary interest to Marxian theorists. They seek to unveil new modes by which labour is organised and subsumed to the control of capital under the new realities of peer production, free social media, the commodification of life itself, the emergence of playbour, and many other empirical realities of contemporary digital capitalism. In Reconsidering Value and Labour in the Digital Age, these themes are explored across a range of insightful and current scholarly contributions.