Copyleft vs. Copyright: A Marxist critique

Marxists have been dismissive of literature giving priority to information over labour and capital in production. The notion of a post-industrial age has become associated with apolitical futurists. Claims that information would replace labour as prime source of value helped to raise suspicion among Marxists, and (not without cause) the post-industrial hype was often written off as a hegemonic smokescreen. Marxists rightly criticize the post-industrialist advocates for failing to take account of power relationships, to forget that information is the result of human labour, to ignore that a staff of 'symbol-analysts' require a labour force that satisfy society's material needs, and to downplay the continuity of capitalist industrialism in the new era (Dyer-Witheford, 1999). Technological utopias have been touted before to justify the destructiveness and smoothen the acceptance of new technologies (Stallabrass, 1995).