Re: [ox-en] Information goods as genuine societal goods
- From: Stefan Meretz <stefan.meretz hbv.org>
- Date: Mon, 24 Mar 2008 11:49:56 +0100
On 2008-03-24 00:15, graham wrote:
I must change my assessment of Free Software. The special quality
of Free Software is not that it creates a sphere without value
substance being outside of the otherwise value producing sphere of
proprietary software. As a universal good software can not embody
value as a matter of principle. Inside the proprietary software
production - being determined by the value form - products are
created whose universal character contradicts their private form.
The new in the old emerges also in the old forms, not only besides
them. Free Software as universal production which also takes on the
form of societal production ("vergesellschaftete Produktion") is
the mode of production adequate to the universal character of the
good. This is the new quality and this constitutes its germ form
character.
Yes, yes, yes. Finally :-)
:-)
Although even so I think 'being determined by the value form' is too
strong
Maybe in the translation there is one adjective missing: "externally"
like this: "Inside the proprietary software production - being
_externally_ determined by the value form - products are created whose
universal character contradicts their private form."
- the fact that there is a continual need to find ways to stop
people as treating them as valueless (ie. copying them) shows that
the 'contradiction' shows itself in a struggle over whether the
value-form applies even to proprietary software, rather than there
being a simple 'determination'.
This "determination" ist only meant as externally imposed conditions
which proprietary software producers cannot circumvent (of course, they
want to make and have to make money from the software).
But what changed your minds?
Well, there have been small steps, and indeed one starting point was one
mail of a nice guy on the german ox mailing list:
http://www.oekonux.de/liste/archive/msg07139.html
Then main "breakthrough" was given by Ernst Lohoff in Krisis No.
31: "The value of knowledge" ("Der Wert des Wissens") which I outlined
using 8 points StefanMn had translated (many thanks for this effort!).
There is a german online version, which has been heavily debated, as you
can imagine: http://www.opentheory.org/immaterial_world_10/text.phtml
This text is a (slightly) extended version of the text StefanMn
translated. I gave a nineth point (going more deeply into Marx):
9. It is a dubiously, but outmost effective achievement of the value
form to translate societal relationships into isolated single
connections of things. This reification (Wikipedia: 'thingification'
of social relations) -- or dynamized: the fetishism -- constitutes
the social relations, wherein the participants of the commodity world
can relate to each other. A precondition of the achievement is, that
the reified sociatability is fulfilled completely by changing hands
and locations and terminating afterwards. Marx called this
the "mystery of the value form" lying in the elementary form of
value: "By means, therefore, of the value-relation expressed in our
equation, the bodily form of commodity B becomes the value form of
commodity A, or the body of commodity B acts as a mirror to the value
of commodity A." This value-related expression does not constitute
itself at all, if "the bodily form of commodity B" extends to an
arbitrary and non-finalizable amount of exemplars, wherein the
commodity A wants to express. If one would construct this
relationship in thought, then the quantum of the bodily form being
the equivalent cannot not be determined, because it would not be
clear, when the digital information good has stopped to replicate
itself. And driving the construction further, the value would
asymptotical go against zero to the extend as new equivalent
exemplars are born as copies.
I think the translation was only the first step -- a critical evalution
will follow from StefanMn. Let's see.
Ciao,
Stefan
--
Start here: www.meretz.de
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