Labor Theory 101 for the IT Worker

While working in the world of technology, we often hear words like "productivity," "innovation," and "agility." Yet behind these concepts lies a profound mechanism concerning how labor is managed and how value is created. Here are the fundamental Marxist concepts that allow us to understand this mechanism:

1. The Law of Value (Labor Theory of Value)

Relation: It is the basic unit of measurement where everything begins.

Where does the "value" of a piece of software, an application, or a database come from? According to Marxist theory, the value of a commodity (something produced to be sold) is measured by the "socially necessary labor time" spent on its production.

• Example: If writing an API takes 10 hours for an averagely skilled programmer, the value of that API is hidden in those 10 hours of labor. As technology advances, this time shortens and the unit value of the commodity falls. The law of value states that, sooner or later, prices in the market are shaped according to the labor expended.

2. Surplus Value

Relation: It explains where the boss's profit comes from after value has been created.

During part of the workday, the worker produces just enough value to cover their own wage (Necessary Labor). The value they produce during the rest of the day, however, goes to the boss. This unpaid labor is precisely what is called Surplus Value.

• Digital Example: An IT worker starts work at 09:00 in the morning. By 12:00, they have actually produced for the company value equal to that day's share of their monthly wage. Every line of code they continue to produce until 18:00 (or, if there is a deadline, until midnight) constitutes the profit that will go into the boss's pocket—that is, surplus value. Exploitation lies exactly here.

3. Enclosure

Relation: To produce surplus value, the means of production and resources must first be "monopolized."

Historically, "enclosure" was the process of fencing off lands commonly used by peasants and converting them into private property. In the digital age, this confronts us as the seizure of the "Knowledge Commons."

• Digital Example: The gathering of all the open-source code, free data, and humanity's shared scientific accumulation on the internet by giant corporations, used solely to train their own artificial intelligence models, is a kind of "digital enclosure." "Knowledge" that once belonged to everyone has now turned into a piece of property sold back to us for a subscription fee.

4. Deskilling

Relation: Capital uses the resources it has enclosed to determine how to control the worker.

The capitalist divides the production process into such fragments that no one can master the work as a whole anymore. Work ceases to be a "craft" and turns into a routine operation. Fancy titles (Senior Architect, Lead Developer, etc.) are sometimes used to disguise just how routine the work has actually become.

• Artificial Intelligence Example: A programmer once established logic, designed algorithms, and wrote code. If, with AI-assisted tools, the work is reduced to the level of "checking the code that AI suggests," the programmer becomes deskilled. This increases the worker's "replaceability" (the ease with which they can be substituted by someone else) and drives wages down.

5. General Intellect

Relation: It is the antidote to deskilling and the key to the society of the future.

Marx foresaw that, with the development of machinery and technology, the fundamental force of production would no longer be the muscle power of individual workers but "society's general accumulation of knowledge" (General Intellect). Science, technology, and social cooperation appear before us as an "intelligence" imprisoned within machines.

• Its Meaning in the Digital Age: Artificial intelligence is in fact the crystallized form of the General Intellect—that is, the shared intelligence of all of us. The problem is not the existence of this intelligence, but the question of who owns it. If this "general intellect" is in the boss's hands, it leaves us unemployed; if it is in the hands of society (the commons), it frees us from compulsory labor.

Summary: A Relational Map

1. With the Law of Value, we understand that our labor creates value.
2. The boss appropriates a part of this value as Surplus Value.
3. To be able to do this, they make the accumulation of knowledge their own property through Enclosure.
4. Using technology, they Deskill the worker, thereby paying them less.
5. Yet technology (AI) is in fact a product of the General Intellect that belongs to all of us.

Conclusion: The worker who grasps this process becomes not merely an "employee" but starts down the path of becoming an Organic Intellectual with the capacity to determine the direction of technology. The goal is to take technology out of being capital's instrument of exploitation and turn it into the instrument of freedom of Homo Commonans (the human who makes the commons).

We will examine these topics one by one in detail.