INTRODUCTION

We know that many contemporary critical theorists believe that the core ideas of Marx are somewhat archaic. In particular, Marx's labour theory of exploitation is thought to be rather obsolete in explaining the nature of present-day capitalism. Marx's main ideas cannot be used to understand how exploitation is now prevalent across society and not just in the industrial factory, and they cannot explain how digital technology unleashes co-creative energies in communities. If truth be told, however, criticisms of Marx's value theory are not particularly new. Variations of them have been made throughout the years; indeed, they were made way before the emergence of digital media. The first major critique of Marx's labour theory of value was in fact articulated a mere twelve years after his death. In 1896, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk published, Karl Marx and the Close of His System. Böhm-Bawerk argues that Marx arbitrarily favours abstract labour as the common substance that allows commodities to exchange with one another, whereas, in reality, there is no historical reason why this should be the case (Böhm-Bawerk 1949: 75). In making his case, Böhm-Bawerk set the template for a critique of Marx that others have subsequently followed, even if they if rarely acknowledge the debt to him. Today, of course, it is countless digital theorists who reject, or at least distance themselves from, Marx's theory of value in favour of terms like ‘information’, ‘networks’, ‘free labour’, ‘co-creation’ and so forth.

The aim of this chapter is to defend a version of Marx's value theory and Marxist class theory. According to Marx, capitalism is first and foremost a class society with an antagonistic relation at its core; a relation ‘in which unpaid surplus-labour is pumped out of the direct pro-ducers’ (Marx [1966] 1991: 927). But more than this, Marx wishes to discern why labour takes a historically specific class form under capitalism, and he endeavours to understand the political results of this class relation (Marx: 1988: 173–5; see also Elson 1979: 123). Marx tells us, for example, that labour in capitalism is not ‘a general category’, but assumes ‘a definite historical form’ (Marx 1969: 285). For Marx, this ‘definite historical form’ is labour's alienated nature under capitalism; ‘alienated’ because every-day acts of work in capitalism are founded on the historic dispossession of labour from the means of production.