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Perspectives on Value and their Implications for Understanding Digital Monopolies

Explaining digital platforms in Marxian terms has had its challenges, especially in the realm of free-of-charge online platforms such as Google and Facebook. The use value and exchange value, commodity and price seem to have no direct association. This sparked many theoretical discussions on how value is created and extracted, with contending perspectives looking at profit from exploited labour, rent from intellectual property or financial speculation as the ultimate sources of value. Perhaps the most popular and widespread has been the (digital) labour theory of value arguing that time spent on digital platforms creates value for platform owners. This approach sharpens our ability to comprehend commodification of user activities but it also hinders theorising circulation and financialization. While close textual reading of Marx’s work provides plenty of evidence that he discussed value in subtly different ways, his theoretical project remained unfinished with novelties such as digital platforms that require integration. The complexity of value is evident in renewed interest towards re-defining what value is (e.g. Mazzucato, 2018 ; Pitts, 2021). We argue that value-form approaches (e.g. Bonefeld, 2014 ; Heinrich, 2009 ; Murray, 2016) enable us to understand digital capitalist monopolies best. Within this framework, labour is still the source of value, but the association of value with price cannot be explained directly with labour time. Instead, money and determination of social forms play a more prominent role. Such an approach is better equipped to improving existing Marxian approaches for theorising the production and circulation on digital platforms that leads to (financialised) monopolies.

Value, labour, money, monopoly

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