This articles presents a marxian-inspired explanation for the current changes in our society, founded on the understanding of the productive and value-based role of information and knowledge in all evolutive stages of the industrial capitalism. It reviews some key properties of the capital-labor relations displayed along the previous industrial revolutions, showing how new productive relations and new top industries came up from them, supported on information and culture, through which the accumulation of capital, as well as the new social dramas, get their way. The private appropriation of information is seen as the major economic, social and political problem to be tackled with in the beginning of this century.
knowledge and labor; public sphere; capitalism and information society