Hasn't the Marxist paradigm always taken account of the fact that all labor is a combination of mental and physical labor , with some labor being predominantly physical and other labor predominantly mental ? In _Capital_ Vol. I, Marx uses the Bible as an example of a commodity. Predominantly mental laborers can be wage-laborers as much as predominantly physical laborers. Thus, though the information technology revolution may increase the proportion of mental to physical labor in some sense overall, doesn't Marx's fundamental analysis of commodity production and wage-labor remain valid with respect to information? Seems to me that the revolution in communication and transportation permits a geographical scattering of the points of production relative to the periods of the Industrial Revolution and Fordist organization of production or division of labor. This is changing the international division of labor as you mention, such that we have "world cars" and the like. However, most new information workers are objectively new proletarians, n'est-ce pas ? Most do not own the basic means of production. They do not own the basic information technology that they use in their work. The basic CAD/CAM technology, automated machinery, critical trade secrets in information technology, satellites, etc. are still the private property of a tiny elite. The end product of the work of the information workers is still a commodity, analyzable as Marx analyzes commodities in _Capital_. Marx and Engels noted this trend of proletarianization of predominantly mental workers in _The Manifesto_. Charles Brown