Digitizing Karl Marx: The New Political Economy of General Intellect and Immaterial Labor

Abstract

Production, distribution, and consumption of digital use values occur today in a sociotechnological setting quite different from that characterizing the industrial economic system. Thanks to increasing access to hardware, software, and the Internet—the means of production in the digital economy—a growing multitude of digital immaterial labors contributes to the digital economy within a culture of sharing and (a culture of) nonexclusionary use of resources. As various online sharing platforms illustrate, digital immaterial labor constitutes a collective and collaborative productive force, an online general intellect, that cannot be reified in the means of production traditionally under the control of capital. This dynamic allows the online multitude to organize itself independently of the logic and management of capital. Capital, however, has been able to develop strategies, peculiar to this new socioeconomic system, that aim to control and profit from the collective intelligence created by digital immaterial labor.