Recent commentary suggesting that the introduction of digital technologies and the consequent prevalence of “immaterial labor” have rendered Karl Marx’s labor theory of value obsolete, thereby signaling the end of capitalism, is critically challenged in a new academic article by Siyaves Azeri. In his work, “Knowledge-Production, Digitalization and the Appropriation of Surplus-Knowledge,” Azeri argues that the true “revolutionary” effect of digitalization is not the obsolescence of capital but the intensification of knowledge-producing labor and a more sophisticated mechanism for the appropriation of commonly produced “surplus-knowledge” by capital.
The core weakness of the “cognitive capitalism” thesis lies in its failure to provide a critical definition of knowledge. Instead, it often tacitly endorses a common-sense, fetishistic view of knowledge as a “thing”—a bulk of propositions, data, or an algorithm—that either accumulates by itself or resides in the mind of the worker. This conceptualization allows theorists to claim that the “immaterially” produced knowledge of the digital age is not subject to the capitalist relations of production and thus is outside the determinations of value.
Azeri counters this by drawing on Evald Ilyenkov’s concept of the “ideal”. Knowledge, in this materialist view, is fundamentally not a thing but a form of activity—the socio-historically specific human activity of “appropriating” nature. It emerges only within the act of knowing, in the metabolic relation between humans and social nature. Crucially, since the form of human activity is determined by the historically specific relations of production, knowledge, as an ideal, is fully subject to the logic of capital, including commodification.
Digitalization as a Tool for Capitalist Command
Azeri posits that digitalization, rather than liberating labor, is a new method for the machinization and industrialization of knowledge-production. It acts as a powerful instrument for the formal and real subsumption of labor under capital, increasing control and the rate of surplus-knowledge extraction.
Real Subsumption through Technology: Digital technologies, including the internet and AI, function as strategies of real subsumption by materially transforming the production process. They accelerate scientific labor, perform routine algorithmic tasks (like literature reviews), and amplify the production of surplus-knowledge. This deployment of technology enables capital to use scientific laborers to produce a greater surplus than the exchange of their labor-power, thereby re-affirming the validity of the labor theory of value.
Formal Subsumption through Management: Capital exploits digitalization to intensify academic labor by introducing mechanisms that blur the work/leisure boundary, impose “flexible” hours, and push for more deliverables. The use of elaborate metrics, such as grant income, citation scores, and impact factors, is part of this intensification, facilitating the measuring and controlling of efficiency and performativity.
Ideal Subsumption and “Free Gifts”: For labor that is not formally in a wage relation, capital uses ideal and non-formal subsumption to appropriate products as “free gifts”. The blurring of the line between leisure and work—where the “knowledgeable consumption of culture is translated into productive activities that are pleasurably embraced”—is a strategy for subjecting this activity to capital. This captures the products of “free internet labour” and the commonly produced surplus-knowledge of the “citizen-scientist”.
Ultimately, the argument concludes that the advantages of machinery, science, and collective social labor in the digital age are all appropriated by capital as free productive forces. Digitalization merely strengthens the two-fold function of institutionalized knowledge-production: standardization and the regulation of knowledge expansion through appropriation.
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