To argue that increasing importance of the information economy invalidates Marx’s labour theory of value means that time and labour-time do no longer play any role in the economy. Consequently, the class conflict must have come to an end and the production of information must have become autonomous from humans. But none of the two can be observed today. There are several reasons why the labour theory of values continues to apply in information capitalism and digital capitalism (see Fuchs 2014a, 2015, 2016b, 2017 for details of these arguments):
• First, commercial software and other information goods are not just produced once and then copied, but there are often new versions, constant updates, and forms of support labour.
• Second, one has to see that large parts of the Internet’s political economy are based on targeted advertising. Google and Facebook are not communications corporations. They are the world’s largest advertising companies. Advertising is not just based on the labour-time of marketing professionals, but also on the attention time of audiences and on commercial Internet usage time that is (unpaid) labour time.
• Third, there is an international division of digital labour, in which various forms of labour are organised. It ranges from the exploitation of enslaved miners in the
Chapter Twelve | The Information Economy
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The Information Industry and Marx’s Labour Theory of Value