IPR sustains the productivity of capitalism and increasingly exploits unpaid labor

If wage labour was a condition for productive labour during the nineteenth century, in the twenty-first century, wage-less-labour has become an increasingly important source of the production of surplus labour (see infra). As in contemporary capitalism, reproduction of living labour depends not only on the aggregate value of rent, water, and food (as a gross simplification of nineteenth-century conditions) but also on a greater level of social relations among economic and extra-economic activities, resulting in a more heterogeneous labour-value to be reproduced. Examples of this are the consumption level of mass-consumer goods, entertainment, and drugs, the constant replacement of planned-obsolescent goods, the necessary access to social digital relations with friends, family, work, and the state, etc., by means of combined hardware-software commodities. Therefore, as social subsistence becomes more complex, many vital activities which are imposed occur outside wage labour relations; nevertheless, they remain subsumed under the economic imperatives of capitalism. The socially necessary labour-time, which is essential for the reproduction of the labour-force, is now divided among many contractual relationships. While the first appears to be the one imposed by wage labour, all access to the digital world entails contractual relations that the user—now a prosumer, a creator of surplus-value in the digital realm (see infra)—must subdue to participate in the digital social life.

While the notion of the social contract represents an idealist theoretical notion, in the digital sphere, one-sided contracts are imposed as an existential condition for the individual’s digital actualisation. “And the development of this material wealth therefore in opposition to, and at the expense of, the human individual. Productivity of labour in general = maximum of product with minimum of labour, therefore as much as possible the improvement of commodities” (Marx, 1988, p. 107). Digital commodification and productive labour thus appear as the summit of productive labour, namely, labour which produces surplus-value. The purpose of the capitalist mode of production is that “the individual product, etc., contain as much unpaid labour as possible, and that this is only achieved by production for the sake of production” (Marx, 1988, p. 107). Marx leaves no room for doubt. The capitalist mode of production presupposes the production of surplus-value because it is its primary and highest goal; productive labour is subordinated to the production of surplus-value, “thus only the labour which is directly consumed in the process of production for the utilisation of capital” (Marx, 1988, p. 108).

It is therefore also absurd to attest to what productive labour ought to be in-itself. Thus, not only prosumers but also knowledge production by intellectual labourers, when subordinated to the economic imperative, become productive labourers. Amazingly, already in the 1860s, Marx realised this, removing from isolated individuals the character of being productive or not. “Productive labour is only an abbreviated expression for the whole relation and manner in which the labour assets and labour figure in the capitalist process of production”, that is, it is its social character that endows it with legality, “productive labour” is “socially determined labour, labour which involves a quite definite relation between the buyer and seller of labour” (Marx, 1988, p. 111). And even when labour cannot be regarded as productive labour, under capitalist relations, it is still subdued and exploited. “The capitalist process of production is not merely the production of commodities. It is a process which absorbs unpaid labour, which makes the means of production the means of absorbing unpaid labour” (Marx, 1988, p. 113). Intellectual labourers and prosumers should thus be regarded in Marxian terms as productive labourers because the money involved in this process does not reside in a monetary form but metamorphoses into capital through the mechanism of surplus labour relations.