ABSTRACT
The first part of this chapter discusses the expanding boundary around value creation in classical political economy, starting with the constrained boundary around agricultural labour promulgated by the Physiocrats and culminating in the ultra-wide boundary of heterodox "postoperaist" Marxists. The postoperaist boundary includes even people using social media during leisure time, and inferentially this is for political purposes since the claim runs counter to principle. The second part of the chapter narrates how the UK deployed identical claims about the scope of the boundary in international corporate tax negotiations to defend its share of the spoils of economic imperialism in respect of hyperexploited labour in the global south. The moral of the tale is that those who purport to treat value as an objective quantity should resist the temptation to bend their theory of it to political ends.
