Digital goods and the "value paradox": An approach from Marxist political economy

Abstract

This article analyzes the "value paradox" of digital goods, the phenomenon of marginal reproduction costs approaching zero, but market prices remain high within the framework of Marxist political economy. While neoclassical economics predicts that prices will tend to be close to zero under conditions of perfect competition and infinite replication, digital market practice suggests a proprietary pricing trend, creating a significant theoretical gap. The study argues that current approaches, including neoclassical theory and some research directions on digital labor, do not clearly distinguish between data, labor, and goods, and tend to equate value with price. On the basis of this critique, the paper proposes a new analytical framework, distinguishing between raw data, digital production materials, and complete digital goods. By means of dialectical materialism, the study demonstrates that the value of digital goods is still based on the social labor required, while prices are increasingly dominated by technological monopoly structures. The concept of "technological monopoly" is proposed to explain this pricing mechanism, thereby contributing to the development of critical theory of contemporary digital capitalism.