“Digital labor”, “digital capital” and “digital capitalism” do not conform to the rules of the use of terms related to political economy and are inappropriate concepts. From the discussions of Chinese and foreign scholars, five types of “digital labor” can be summarized, among which only labor using digital means of production is closest to the rules of political economy and is suitable to be called digital production or digital management. The digital platforms of Internet companies belong to the category of constant capital. The applications used to acquire and process data are the means of labor, and the data are only the objects of labor．“Digital capitalism” has other forms of exploitation and deprivation besides the general capitalist exploitation, i.e. the exploitation of the enterprise employees. Getting benefits from grasping data like collecting rents from possessing land is more in line with the principles of political economy than digital capitalization. Life time can be divided into labor time, free time and lost time. The time spent watching advertisements, which is closely related to the “audience labor” and “digital labor” proposed by Western scholars, is the lost time.

Editor: Zhong Yao、Zheng Yifan

From:Studies on Marxism.2021.No.5.