Science & Society, Vol. 81, No.

1, January 2017, 35–53

Universal Labor and the Future of Value

VICTORIA GRITSENKO AND VLADIMIR ORLOV

ABSTRACT: In the middle of the 19th century, Marx noticed the
emerging new form of labor, universal (automated) labor. Its devel-
opment and contradiction with the capitalist mode of production
fostered several significant changes in modern society, called “post-
industrial” by some theorists. Contemporary society is complicated.
Although capitalism is still dominant, some modern tendencies
cannot be considered capitalist. Universal labor brings with it the
interesting problem of measuring its results, because the frames
of commodity value do not suit them. Our goal is to connect the
new forms of labor with fundamental changes in the essence of
value. We suggest a hypothesis of transition from commodity value
to informational value, due to the key features of universal labor.

I
N GRUNDRISSE AND IN CAPITAL III, Marx scientifically predicted
the appearance of some extraordinary tendencies of social devel-
opment, which in the second half of the 20th century were given
the name post-industrial society (information society, knowledge society,
knowledge economy, etc.) by a number of researchers. We use these
terms here as synonyms. We appeal to these theories not because
they can help us to explain the existing changes in modern society,
but because they had noticed, on the surface of it, some interesting
phenomena. In our opinion, these phenomena are to be explained
according to classical Marxist political economy and Marx’s brilliant
predictions. Whatever its bourgeois limitations, post-industrial theory
could not avoid observing the changes produced by the processes
Marx predicted.
In the 1960s–1970s Daniel Bell, Alvin Toffler, Jean Fourastiy,
George Lichtheim, Rolf Dahrendorf, Peter F. Drucker and others
created the first variant of the post-industrial theory. Translated
35

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into Japanese, the works of these sociologists and futurologists were

rethought and reworked by Japanese theorists, such as Tadao Umesao,
Yoneji Masuda, Taichi SaKaiya and others. Manuel Castells, who made
a series of significant addenda to the theory, represents the “third
wave” of interest in this theory. During the last 20 years the theory of
post-industrial society became widespread in the social sciences, espe-
cially in the USA, Canada and Europe. Marxist researchers, such as
those from the Frankfurt school (Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse,
Max Horkheimer and others), “Autonomist Marxists” (Antonio Negri,
Michael Hardt, Nick Dyer-Witheford, Sally Lerner and others), Ernest
Mandel, Georg Lukács, Harry Braverman, Sean Sayers, Katie Vann,
Vincent Mosko, Thomas W. O’Donnell, Andrew Feenberg and Philip
Graham, have also produced interpretations of post-industrial society.
An appealing detail is that the most serious philosophical ques-
tions of modern society — those addressing the main contemporary
forms of material labor, of the universal means of production, of the
relation between the technical and personal components of social
reality — are raised mainly by the Marxists.
In Russia two traditions studying post-industrial society stand out.
The first was organized by Vladislav L. Inozemtsev; the second, from
the Perm School of philosophy, which is Marxist in orientation, is
headed by one of the authors of this article, Vladimir V. Orlov.
According to post-industrial theory, society passes through three
stages, or “waves” (in Toffler’s parlance), of development. The first,
the pre-industrial or agrarian stage, is connected with production of
matter. This society is often called extractive ; human interaction here
is essentially with nature. The second is industrial society. It is productive,
and associated with the use of energy; people are related to machines
and mechanisms. The third, post-industrial, is linked with information. It
is the elaborating society; the main interconnection is between people,
human to human. The emergence of each of the subsequent stages
is regarded as an evolutionary process.
A remarkable fact, which highlights the character of the new
society and economy, is that by 1955 expenditures for information
came to exceed those for production of material values in the USA.
So, while talking about post-industrial changes, we note first that they
appear in so-called developed countries. The post-industrial stage
could be successfully described with the following key characteristics:

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1. Knowledge and information, being worked up and extended

for all the spheres of economy, become the main source of
productivity and growth. N. N. Moiseev declares that more
than 80% of expenses of time and value falls on work with
information today (Moiseev, 1998, 98).

2. Economic activity shifts from production of consumer goods to

production of services. In the late 1990s the service field made
up 73.7% of GDP in the USA, 66.8% in France, 64.3% in Italy,
and 62.6% in the United Kingdom (Prudsky, 2009, 48).

3. The professions closely connected with the high richness of

knowledge and information play the main role in the new
economy. According to David Alberts and Thomas Czerwin-
ski, the contribution of the “knowledge sector” to the USA’s
economy is close to 60% (Alberts and Czerwinski, 1997, 87).
The heart of the new social structure consists of so-called pro-
fessionals and technicians (or “white collar” workers).

There are many other aspects of the new society. In this brief
summary we would underline globalization of economy, politics and
culture. From Castells’ point of view, globalization is the functioning
of the economy of the “G7” on a world scale. That means that the
vanguard of the contemporary type of labor — automated (universal)
labor — is being developed in such countries as the USA, Germany,
Japan and so on. On the other hand, in the so-called developing coun-
tries the hand labor and primitive forms of machine labor create the
largest part of national wealth. Globalization implies the exclusion
of some countries and even regions such as Africa from the global
system of economy and the outstanding growth of inequality in the
world. Having analyzed data from 73 countries, the organizers of the
UN Development Program found an increase in inequality in 53 of
them (covering over 80% of the world population) (Greig, Hulme
and Turner, 2007, 3). As these authors show, during the last 200 years
the gap in income per person between the richest and the poorest
increased from 3:1 to 30:1 and 50:1 (ibid., 2–4).
If we consider information to be the most important phenomenon
of modern society, we should be more alarmed with informational

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inequality. While in the so-called developed countries the basic level of

compulsory education was reached long ago, millions of children all
over the world don’t attend school. While in the early 2000s more than
50% of the U. S. population used the Internet, in the whole continent
of Africa only 0.4% of people did. In this case Joseph Stiglitz draws our
attention to the close relation between the “asymmetry” of informa-
tion and the “asymmetry” of property and economic power. He also
speaks about the“double standards” used by different international
organizations and the developed countries. At the same time as they
recommend to developing countries ultra-liberal economic methods
of the open market, decrease in state expenditures and widespread
privatization, the developed countries themselves enlarge their state
expenditures and keep up the state regulation of the economy. That
is why the growth of state property seems important for post-industrial
society. From 1870 to 1996 government spending grew from 12 to 55%
of GDP in France, from 9 to 50% in The Netherlands, from 10 to 49%
in Germany, from 12 to 53% in Italy, from 9 to 36% in Japan, and
from 4 to 33% in the USA. In 2004 government spending amounted
to 54% of GDP in France, 47% in Germany, 45% in the UK, and 36%
in the USA (Andrianov, 2008, 131).
In the rapidly expanding service sector the main role also belongs
to the fields that Bell has called non-market: science, education,
administration, public health, and so on.
From different points of view, post-industrial society has received
various interpretations. It was also called post-bourgeois, post-­capitalist,
post-business society, and late capitalism. It is quite clear that post-­
industrial theories have borrowed much from Marx. Although post-
industrial authors have polemicized against Marxism, they have also
themselves claimed many characteristically Marxist themes — notions
of progress, of materialism, of liberation and, of course, of revolution
itself. What is more, some of today’s most prominent informational
society theorists are themselves one-time Marxists, apostates who have
drawn heavily on their former beliefs even while developing a new creed.
According to Hendrick Hertzberg, theorists of post-industrial
society continue to represent Marxist ideas in a new form, although
they do not acknowledge this and try hard to be bourgeois apologists.
There is an eerie, if superficial, similarity between this and Marx’s story
of how feudalism (more or less equivalent to Toffler’s agrarian first
wave) gives way to capitalism (Toffler’s second wave), and capitalism,

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in turn, is replaced by communism (Toffler’s cybernetic third wave).

As Hertzberg observes: “Each stage, in its time, constitutes a tremen-
dous advance in human progress; each eventually becomes obsolete
(the ‘contradictions,’ as the Marxists say, begin to get out of hand);
and the next emerges from the collapsing ruin of its predecessor”
(Hertsberg, 1995, 7).
Moreover, Hertzberg notes, Toffler even sounds like Marx. The
first sentence of his most recent book, Creating a New Civilization, reads:
“A new civilization is emerging in our lives, and blind men everywhere
are trying to suppress it” — an obvious allusion to the famous open-
ing of the Communist Manifesto: “A specter is haunting Europe — the
specter of Communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered
into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter.”
Hertzberg is, we suppose, quite successful in finding parallels
between Marx and Toffler because, on the one hand, Marx’s views
on social development reveal objective trends that are hard to avoid;
and, on the other hand, because post-industrial theorists were Marx-
ists in their youth and their analytical skills were formed under the
influence of Marxism. Although they are trying to do their best to
formulate non-Marxist approaches, some Marxist features appear in
their thinking.
According to Nick Dyer-Witheford,

the relation of these theories to Marxism is, however, not just one of antago-
nism, but of appropriation. Produced by intellectuals who were often familiar
with or had actually espoused Marxist ideas, the concept of the information
society derives much of its analytic force and imaginative power from a re-
writing of Marxism that retains the notion of historical progress towards a
classless society, but reinscribes technological advance rather than class con-
flict as the driving force in this transformation. (Dyer-Witheford, 1999, 63.)

Following Ernest Mandel, Dyer-Witheford names the post-­

industrial stage of social development late capitalism (cf. Mandel,
1975). His own description is the following:

I analyze how the information age, far from transcending the historic conflict
between capital and its laboring subjects, constitutes the latest battleground
in their encounter; how the new high technologies — computers, telecom-
munications, and genetic engineering — are shaped and deployed as instru-
ments of an unprecedented, worldwide order of general commodification;

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and how, paradoxically, arising out of this process appear forces which could
produce a different future based on the common sharing of wealth — a
twenty-first century communism. (Dyer-Witheford, 1999, 2.)

We agree with the understanding of the modern stage as late capi-

talism. But if we consider that no society can be regarded as pristine,
innocent of the elements of previous and future types of society, then
modern capitalism as well is not devoid of some feudal and even slave-
owning elements, as well as future socialist elements. That’s why we see
post-industrial theory as a quite interesting version of the contemporary
stage of social development, as society undergoes profound technical,
economical and cultural changes toward socialism. Many aspects of
changes in labor and human interactions are described by the theory
of post-industrial society. But if we want to analyze the essence of these
changes, we need to appeal to Marxist theory, with its deeper under-
standing of man and society, the general naturally determined process
of history, material labor and its role in human progress.
So, what makes modern Marxist theories studying contempo-
rary society very unlike their post-industrialist analogs is their basis.
Autonomist Marxism and the Perm School of philosophy had sepa-
rately come to the conclusion that all the phenomena noticed by
post-industrial theory can be adequately explained if we consider the
historically new form of material labor, as this has emerged recently.
Marx, who predicted this new form, called it automated, scientific,
or universal, labor.
Our aim, thus, is reduced to the analysis of the most advanced and
the most complicated form of labor today — universal (automated)
labor. In mid-19th century, Marx purposefully studied the most compli-
cated and least widespread form of labor at that time — machine labor.
Machine labor created most of the public wealth only in England, the
“world’s workshop.” In less developed countries, at that time, manual
craft and peasant labor continued to play the leading role. Analysis of
machine labor allowed Marx not only to reveal and explain its main
features and social consequences, but also to predict further develop-
ment of the types of labor, the emergence of the automatic factory
and systems of machines, and the rise of fully automated labor as the
bases of public wealth in the coming new type of society.
In Capital III, Marx provides a sketch of what he calls universal
labor: “Universal labor is all scientific work, all discovery and invention.

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It is brought about partly by the cooperation of men now living, but

partly also by building on earlier work” (Marx, 1981, 198–199). The
fruits of this collective project, Marx argues, are generally appropri-
ated by the “most worthless and wretched kind of money-capitalists.”
But the ultimate source of their profit is the “new developments of
the universal labor of the human spirit and their social applications
by combined labor” (ibid., 199).
In the Grundrisse Marx develops the term “automated labor” (the
first form of universal labor). Automated labor is the application of
knowledge and experimental science, creative and materially embod-
ied science. It indicates that the worker turns from a direct participant
in the production process into its controller and regulator.
Marx predicts that capital’s drive to dominate living labor through
machinery will mean that “the creation of real wealth comes to depend
less on labor time and on the amount of labor employed” than on “the
general state of science and on the progress of technology” (Marx,
1973, 690). As Daniel Ross points out, “these forms of work inherently
resist regimentation and formalization” (Ross, 2013). But to our mind,
this means that if labor time loses its role as a measure of common
wealth, this role should come to be played by some other factor.
Technological application of science, the opening of the uni-
versal essential forces of the human being, the highest point of the
development of matter, and taking under control more and more
powerful forces of nature — these become the main production fac-
tors. Universal labor (sometimes called “scientific,” in a broad sense)
is closely connected with science as the universal historical product
of the human spirit, but it doesn’t coincide with it. Universal labor is
the practical application of science; it is labor highly saturated with
science. If the historically previous forms of labor, such as hand-labor
and machine labor, were based mostly on experience and practice,
this new form appears on the foundation of a sufficiently high level
of science.
That is why it is rather difficult, as regards the philosophical
aspects of the problem, to detach advanced science from its techno-
logical application in complicated labor. It is crucially important to
ascertain whether the new form of labor is material or not. If universal
labor is a form of material labor, as are hand- and machine labor, only
much more complicated than these, then Marxist political economy
still properly describes modern society. If not, then while primitive

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society, feudalism and capitalism were premised on material labor,

post-industrial society relies on a foundation of intellectual labor
(especially science).
It should be noticed here that a form of material labor and a
form of society that it builds up do not have a direct correlation. No
doubt spiritual phenomena (superstructure, all in all) have a large
influence on social life. But according to Marx, in the final analysis
it is material labor that makes up the ultimate characteristics of the
society. We can’t have capitalism based on primitive pre-historic hand-
labor, and so on.
Nowadays the conception of non-material labor has become very
popular among post-industrialists. Most of them identify the new form
of labor with science or information that they consider to be spiritual
phenomena. That is why they argue the Marxist theory of material
labor as the basis of society has become old-fashioned. One of the well-
known supporters of this view is Vladislav L. Inozemtsev (Inozemtsev,
2000). He supposes that post-industrial society, unlike the previous
ones, is based not on material labour, but on spiritual creativeness.
Creative labor is often equated to universal labor, and understood
as intellectual labor. For example, Aleksandr V. Buzgalin and Andrey I.
Kolganov, taking universal labor as intellectual, state: “Marxist theory
takes the well-known position that this universal creative labor does
not create value, but that it gives rise to a genuine (non-simulative)
social wealth,” although they are absolutely right in the conclusion:
“For creative labor this value form is false. . .” (Buzgalin and Kolganov,
2013).
However, some modern Marxists, such as Sean Sayers and Vladi-
mir V. Orlov, provide detailed arguments concerning the material
character of universal labor. First and foremost, the question is how to
understand the term “material character.” As V. I. Lenin stated, mat-
ter is that which, acting upon our sense-organs, produces sensation;
matter is the objective reality given to us in sensation (Lenin, 1908).
We may conclude that matter is not a synonym for touchable, corpo-
real or physical matter. That is why material labor is not just direct or
physical labor. Material labor is carried out with the help of material
means of production, and creates a material product.
Sayers suggests a useful concept of labor as “formative” activity.
He shows how the post-industrial immaterial labor theme comes from
an incorrect “productivist” logic, one that regards work that creates

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a material product — industrial, craft or artistic work — as the para-

digm for all work (Sayers, 2007, 432). Many traditional kinds of work
do not seem to fit this picture, and new “immaterial” forms of labor
(computer work, service work, etc.) have developed in post-industrial
society which, it is argued, necessitate a fundamental revision of Marx’s
approach. In Sayers’ view, a Marxist understanding of labor, in the
context of Hegel’s philosophy, has nothing to do with the mistaken
model of “productivism.”

Although the use of computer control in manufacturing industry involves

information technology, it is misleading to describe this as “immaterial”
labor. The fact that many aspects of car production, for example, are now
automated and computerized, does not mean that car making has ceased to
be a material process, or that car workers are no longer engaged in material
production. Although machines now do the work and shop floor workers no
longer “get their hands dirty,” nevertheless, by controlling these machines,
they still have material effects and produce material goods. Their work is
still material and formative in character. (Ibid., 444.)

Sayers fights the notion that so-called “symbolic” and “affective”

labor are not material and “formative.” “Symbolic” work is primarily
intellectual or linguistic. It “produces ideas, symbols, codes, texts, lin-
guistic figures, images, and other such products.” It includes computer
programming, public relations, graphic design, and various sorts of
media work. He agrees that the primary purpose of work of this kind,
it is true, is not to create a material product. But “the error here is to
imagine that ‘immaterial’ symbolic work has no material result and
that only work which directly creates a tangible material product,
like industry or craft, is ‘formative’ activity” (ibid., 445). Sayers finds
it wrong to believe that “symbolic” work creates only symbols or ideas
— effects that are purely subjective and intangible. All labor operates
by intentionally forming matter in some way. Symbolic labor is no
exception: it involves making marks on paper, agitating the air and
making sounds, creating electronic impulses in a computer system, or
whatever. Only in this way is it objectified and realized as labor. What
is more, symbolic work is primarily concerned with activities such as
realization of value through distribution, exchange, marketing, etc.
that are essential to the process of production in a developed indus-
trial economy. As for “affective” labor — simply understood as service
work — it has material results that serve to produce and reproduce

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social relations. In this way, affective labor activities are forms of self-
creation, the final product of which is society. We may note here, that
Sayers understands man exactly as Marx did — as a material creature
with a creative essence, who creates himself, other people and condi-
tions for existence.
Sayers gives his own understanding of universal labor. “Such work
is a universal, rational (i.e., ‘scientific’ in a broad sense), self-conscious,
collective kind of creative activity: conscious self-production and self-
creation” (ibid., 452) that in more favorable conditions might extend
our distinctively human, universal and rational, creative powers. It
could become for us “free” labor, undertaken not because we are
forced by economic necessity, but because it has become “life’s prime
want.”
Marx himself gave serious arguments for the material character
of universal labor. As for cooperation and using earlier work, these
features could be ascribed to complex material labor. It would be
naive to think that science, as a universal spiritual human force, could
be embodied in the process of production “just” by simple physical
labor, without any universal material substance, corresponding to its
level — universal labor. The distinction between universal labor and
the universal intellect also appears in the Grundrisse, and, we think,
not merely by chance. Finally, the entire philosophic basis of Marx’s
political economy makes us think that this is the case.
What is more, we assume that information as the main resource,
subject and result in post-industrial society production also has a material
character. According to the “father of cybernetics” Norbert Wiener, the
amount of information in a system is a measure of its degree of organi-
zation, a measure of regulation. In everyday language we often use the
term “information” as a synonym for “knowledge,” “facts,” or “data.”
Wiener, however, means quite the opposite. He speaks about infor-
mation according to the material processes occurring inside material
closed-loop machines — computers. That’s why we may conclude that
information is an abstract material structure in a some kinds of systems.
And if we interpret information as a measure of organization, regula-
tion, complexity, and so on, it appears to be something material, part
of the world of material systems. As we become aware of information, it
receives an intellectual character in addition. But inside the computer
or any other information technology system there are material processes
functioning, the transformation of abstract material structures.

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The basis and necessary condition for various types of universal

labor, the direct reason for integration and accumulation of labor on
a world scale and the distillation of the universal labor, is computer
labor. Its subject and product is the abstract material structure. The
means of labor is the computer, computer systems up to the global net.
Thomas O’Donnell called the computer the universal means of labor
(O’Donnell, 2005). Its main feature is its ease of use, and its ability
to deal with a truly unrestricted number of problems. The internet
appears as the first world collective productive structure, incompatible
with the local structures of the past. This is why computer labor has a
deeply collective character, incommensurable with the collective labor
of previous epochs by virtue of its content and breadth. The collec-
tive character of production at the industrial stage of development
described in Capital is related to the division of labor and exchange.
By contrast, the computer integrates and accumulates people’s labor
all over the world and of all generations directly. A shining example
of collective computer labor is net services like “Zoho,” which help
to provide collective scientific research. Zoho Office Suite is a web-
based online office suite containing word processing, presentations,
databases, note taking, customer relationship management, project
management, invoicing, and other applications for scientific research
and scholars’ use. The phenomenon of grid computing, which is the
collection of computer resources from multiple locations to reach a
common goal (SETI@Home, http://members.ud.com and others),
also corresponds to this idea.
The other types of universal labor are the so-called social or
humanitarian services. Bell created a broad classification of services,
with science, education, health care and government among them.
These services, unlike commodities, are referred directly to an indi-
vidual, to the production of a human being as a whole complicated
entity, and to the quality of his/her life on the spot. Today, as Marx
brilliantly predicted and post-industrial theorists such as Bell and
Castells have repeated, science has turned into a direct productive
force. However, science, according to Marx, being in capitalist society
a part of capital, never seems to fit into the scheme of the capitalist
mode of production. He used the labor of actors, artists, teachers and
physicians to illustrate his point.
Bell emphasizes that the level of scientific development and espe-
cially fundamental science play the key role in the potential of state

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formation. That is why the developed countries are now so concerned

with organization of all the necessary conditions for rapid progress
in science and education. The centers of social development are now
scientific and research laboratories and universities. But the important
thing is that humanitarian services, as Bell shows, have a non-market
character and form a non-market economy of welfare, where there
are no adequate mechanisms of valuation of social goods.
Partly this is because with the appearance of universal labor
the wealth of society depends on universal human powers that help
to incorporate the extensive powers of nature into the production
process. That means destruction of the proportion, or conformity,
between material and abstract wealth, between use value and value,
between concrete and abstract labor. In other words, universal labor
brings about the destruction, or degeneration, of the commodity–
value relation itself that had formed the basis of commodity produc-
tion in general and capitalist production in particular for so long.
This outstanding tendency was first noted by Marx.
In Capital I, Marx makes a distinction between concrete labor and
abstract labor. Being the basis of value, abstract labor is traditionally
characterized as a simple averaged labor defined by averaged labor
time. Universal labor, as the new form of labor, differs considerably
from this conception. First and foremost, it accumulates the labor of
predecessors and integrates the labor of contemporaries, so it can
never be averaged or measured. Second, it is labor of high complex-
ity and creativity. In this sense universal labor is truly creative. Third,
it involves increasingly powerful forces of nature and human society.
Universal labor is thus the labor of another essence and by its essence
it doesn’t create value. That is why it is so difficult to calculate the value
and price of computer programs, scientific invention or innovation.
Of course, the old capitalist logic does its best to oppress the
new form of labor and squeeze it into the old framework of capitalist
relations.

Capital itself is a moving contradiction, [in] that it presses to reduce labour

time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as sole
measure and source of wealth. . . . On the one side, then, it calls to life all
the powers of science and of nature, as of social combination and of social
intercourse, in order to make the creation of wealth independent (relatively)
of the labour time employed on it. On the other side, it wants to use labour

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time as the measuring rod for the giant social forces thereby created, and
to confine them within the limits required to maintain the already created
value as value. (Marx, 1973, 637–638.)

In Capital II, Marx investigates the relation between the time of pro-
duction and the time of circulation. Capital is born in the process of
production, but it constitutes itself with the help of circulation and
it can not exist without circulation. However, by its nature capital
always tries to shorten the time of circulation. The higher the speed
of circulation of capital is, the more time there is for production. But,
as Marx pointed out, shortening the time of circulation demolishes
capital and bulldozes a way for the new communist type of production
and society. Universal labor and modern high technologies provide an
opportunity to do business with the speed of internet communications.
The title of Bill Gates’ famous book, Business @ the Speed of Thought,
is reality now. Doesn’t this mean that capital is nearly facing its end?
One more vivid symptom of the degeneration of commodity value
(and abstract labor as well) is that the mass of dollar-denominated
derivatives exceeds the value of real commodity production by nearly
ten times. This was one of the central factors of the last world eco-
nomic crisis, 2008–2010. Use value and value appear divorced and
independent.
But if the old value relation is disappearing, what comes after
it? The present crisis of the old form of commodity value has led to
a hunt for the new value substation among economists and philoso-
phers. Bell entertained the possibility of using information as a new
substance of value. Information really has perfect characteristics for
playing this role. It is objective (independent of the subject using or
translating it), imperishable, interminable and inexhaustible. Being
an abstract material structure, it represents the quantitative side of any
process or phenomenon. As an abstract material structure informa-
tion is homogeneous; it exists in any subject or process of the material
world, insofar as these can be depicted, mirrored or photographed.
This means also that information is an abstract qualitative structure
of the process of computer labor as well.
Here we may consider an analogy between information as an
abstract quantitative material structure and abstract material labor,
the central type of labor in the industrial capitalist mode of produc-
tion. Of course, this is not a perfect analogy, and we use it only to

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illustrate the possibility of using information as a basis for the newly

appearing form of value. As abstract labor, computer labor may be
regarded as averaged labor, but in a completely different sense. What
makes computer labor somehow averaged is its object and workman-
ship: information. Information, being homogeneous and in some
way abstract, appears to be an analog to abstract labor, although it
represents a much more complicated essence of labor.
Certainly, computer labor, as the most significant type of com-
plex and highly creative universal labor, has nothing to do with the
monotonous and destructive abstract labor of the previous epoch.
However, the products of universal labor must still be compared. And
if we speak about a historically new form of value, we may suppose it
would be based on information, due to its abstract character.
But a bit of information is absolutely indifferent to what it repre-
sents. A bit may mean a red or green traffic light, or life or death of
a person. Information is completely abstracted from the qualitative
side of objects and processes, and this is its essential “fault,” which
gets in the way of its being a new basis of value.
In this aspect, we assume that a serious approach to the possi-
bility of a new information value must be able to articulate abstract
information, in its full meaning and sense. This could be done via
the fundamental philosophical theory of the integrated naturally
determined universal world process that represents the world as a
hierarchy of levels (or forms) of matter. The material world is infinite,
so there must be an infinite number of levels of matter. Today we are
aware of four of them: physical, chemical, biological and social (or
man and society).
Friedrich Engels came up with the idea of the integrated natu-
rally determined universal world process first, and he also marked a
mechanical form of matter, in addition to the ones listed.

With progressive cooling the interplay of the physical forms of motion which
become transformed into one another comes more and more to the fore-
front until finally a point is reached from when on chemical affinity begins
to make itself felt, the previously chemically indifferent elements become
differentiated chemically one after another, obtain chemical properties, and
enter into combination with one another . . .

If, finally, the temperature becomes so far equalized that over a consider-
able portion of the surface at least it does not exceed the limits within which

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 UNIVERSAL LABOR 49

protein is capable of life, then, if other chemical conditions are favourable,

living protoplasm is formed . . .

Thousands of years may have passed before the conditions arose in which
the next advance could take place and this formless protein produce the first
cell by formation of nucleus and cell membrane. . . . And from this the first
animals were developed, essentially by further differentiation, the numerous
classes, orders, families, genera, and species of animals; and finally mammals,
the form in which the nervous system attains its fullest development; and
among these again finally that mammal in which nature attains conscious-
ness of itself — man. (Engels, 1883.)

Some modern Marxists now include the mechanical form within the
physical.
So, the substantial use of information, Engels supposes, needs to
consider the different qualitative complexity of the subjects and pro-
cesses hidden behind the equal bits of information that are being used
at the physical, chemical, biological and social levels. This goal may
be achieved if we apply the so-called quantors of complexity to each
of the main levels of informational complexity describing the mate-
rial world. This would help quantitatively “empty” bits of information
receive a substantial interpretation. Of course, this approach needs a
deeper formulation, but it might be the first step toward overcoming
the initial “flow” of information.
We find this project of making information the new foundation of
value quite realistic and progressive in general, although we find that
it needs a little correction. In this case we agree with Guido Starosta,
who challenges the Cognitive Capitalism approach with its thesis “that
we are living in an age of crisis of the ‘law of value’ as the dynamic
principle presiding over the contradictory movement of contemporary
capitalism” (Starosta, 2012). Moreover, we think that the present crisis
does not disprove the classical Marxist political economy, but helps
us to develop it using its own analytical instruments. Confining our
attention to Marx’s labor theory, we affirm that it is labor that creates
value in any historical epoch. But considering the development of
value as the progression of its forms — elementary (or accidental),
total (or expanded), general and the money-form — we need to sug-
gest a fifth new form of commodity value, informational value. It must be
remembered, however: it is universal labor that creates informational
value, not information itself.

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 50 SCIENCE & SOCIETY

We see the emerging informational value in projects such as Cyber-

syn and OGAS. Project Cybersyn was a Chilean project from 1971–
1973 (during the government of President Salvador Allende) aimed
at constructing a distributed decision support system to aid in the
management of the national economy. OGAS was a nationwide auto-
mated system for recording and processing information, created by
the outstanding Soviet scientist Victor Glushkov. The project, among
other things, had 100 centers in major industrial cities, where there
was already processed information, being fed into a single national
center. These centers have been merged together over broadband
and connected with 10,000 businesses and organizations. A feedback
mechanism allows for continual adjustment of management decisions.
Of course, this system would be able to quickly eliminate bureaucracy,
and that is why it was not implemented after all. Developed in former
socialist systems, Cybersyn and OGAS illustrate the very idea of mea-
suring production by means of information, and therefore could be
very helpful in future economic work.
One more complicated problem in this respect is the problem
of property. In history there is a clear logic: pre-historical primeval
society/collective labor/collective ownership of the means of pro-
duction; feudalism and capitalism/private labor/private ownership;
post-industrial society/universal labor/collective ownership again.
And, first and foremost, the property unit now should be the most
important subject and product of labor — information.
The problem of informational property is usually raised in a
restricted context of copyright, which undoubtedly has private prop-
erty in mind, although researchers agree that it is practically impos-
sible to count how much this or that piece of information costs. As
we have mentioned, this is closely connected with the integrative and
accumulative directly collective character of universal labor itself. But,
so far as we are concerned, no philosopher or economist other than
Marxists perceives a need for collective ownership of information.
The reality of social life, however, demonstrates that computer
labor itself bulldozes its way outwards from private property. The
property principle is now attacked by the network (peer-to-peer) tech-
nologies of file exchange, which have grown so popular that in 2006
in Sweden a political formation antagonistic to copyright law was
created. This received a legal name, the “Pirates’ Party,” and since
2009 the Party is represented in the Swedish parliament. Analogous

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 UNIVERSAL LABOR 51

parties have appeared in several countries of Europe, North and South

America. And if we look through some programmers’ forums on the
internet, we discover a popular cry for the socialization of informa-
tion, especially of sources. As Dyer-Witheford points out:

At the very time when innovations in communication are becoming the

basis for vast commercial empires, there is apparent an opposite tendency
that flouts the logic of the market. People are using the new technologies
to get or give out information for free: reproducing, transmitting, sampling
and reconfiguring without respect for commercial property rights. This is
known as “piracy.” And it is prevalent. As access to the new communication
machines becomes more and more thoroughly socialized, we see a wave of
photocopying, home taping, bootlegged videos, copied software, zapping,
surfing, descrambling, and culture jamming. Moreover, an increasingly wide
variety of groups and movements are using this generalized availability of
communication technologies not simply for individual but for collective
purposes. (Dyer-Witheford, 1999, 244–245.)

Of course, the socialization of information is a matter for the distant

future, but it should be underlined that the tendency for socialization
comes from the very essence of the directly collective integrative and
accumulative universal labor.
Having analyzed the key features of the new type of labor —
universal (automated) labor — that is becoming today the basis of
public wealth in the so-called developed countries, we came to the
following conclusions. Universal labor, involving enormous forces
of nature in the production process, in essence differs significantly
from the previous types and forms of labor: manual, machine, con-
crete and abstract. So universal labor can’t be averaged and measured
by working hours. Therefore, it can’t essentially create commodity
value, which must take the form of quanta of abstract labor. In our
opinion, the new type of labor has to generate a new form of value —
­information value — which will be the cornerstone of development of
non-capitalist relations of production and non-commodity exchange.
On the other hand, capital in every way seeks to suppress these ten-
dencies. For example, the worker in the system of modern automated
production is still receiving a time wage for work as the controller
and regulator of production. This work, however, is not identical to
the routine of simple labor operations during a certain period of
time. Besides, automated labor can’t be reduced to labor expenses,

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 52 SCIENCE & SOCIETY

as it demands technological application of science, a high education

level and creative thinking. Today capital pretends that there is no
difference between abstract labor and universal labor. However, the
objective tendencies generated by the essence of universal labor will
inevitably bring the relations of production into consensus with the
new productive forces.
We do live in an amazingly breathtaking epoch. We have become
involuntary eye-witnesses to the appearance of a historically new form
of material labor — universal labor — which inevitably brings with it
the destruction of abstract labor on whose base capitalism had grown,
come into blossom and made its way to the end, and the destruc-
tion of value on whose base commodity production had existed. So,
what next? We hope that the complicated problem we’ve stated will
provoke a useful discussion on the future of value, and of the entire
social economy.

Vladimir Orlov:
Komsomolsky Prospekt, 49, Flat 30
614039, Perm
Russian Federation
vvorlov@psu.ru

Victoria Gritsenko:
Pushkina Street, 37, Flat 36
614000, Perm
Russian Federation
gritsenkovs89@gmail.com

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