Digital Information and Value: A Response to Jakob Rigi

Abstract

In a series of recent articles, Jakob Rigi has formulated an articulate and sophisticated Marxian view about the relationship between digital production and value theory. Anyone interested in the economic dynamics of FAMGA (Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Google and Amazon) needs to come to terms with the position Rigi stakes out. In this article, I challenge Rigi’s thesis that profits from the sale of digital information (DI) constitute rent. I do so by calling into question his conclusions concerning the valuelessness of DI. After summarising Rigi’s core position and sketching out its entailments, I make the case that (1) Rigi’s assertions about the intrinsic valuelessness of DI are not supported by the model of production he invokes; that (2) Rigi’s valuelessness argument in fact presupposes that DI has value; that (3) far from furnishing evidence that DI is valueless and therefore a source of rent income, as Rigi holds, the existence of the intellectual property regime is precisely what allows DI to act as a congealment of value (i.e. labour time) in commodity form; and that (4) Rigi misapplies Marx’s notion of reproduction to the sale/copy/distribution of DI. I offer this critique as an invitation for us to rethink, from a Marxian perspective, the status of the digital economy within the order of global capitalist value production.

Unproductive Labor and the Smile Curve

“…If you permit an ambiguity to exist as between actual prior concrete labor in production as a source of value and the notional prior labor predicated socially by commodities and conditions of production at the point of exchange, you cannot go so far as to claim that the product of knowledge-creating labor is worth nothing—there may be some homeopathically reduced residue of actual prior concrete labor. Accordingly, there exists some debate over whether information commodities might be of a value that tends towards zero as opposed to being actually zero (Rigi 2015; Parkhurst 2019). Zero is the answer that adheres more closely to Marx’s social model of value as strictly understood, however, and has been convincingly argued for in recent literature in this area (Rotta and Teixeria 2019).…”