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Re: [ox-en] Information goods as genuine societal goods



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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