Date: Mon, 10 Feb 1997 08:15:34 -0500 (EST) From: Gerald Levy <glevy-AT-pratt.edu> Subject: cultural content of the commodity Fergal Finnegan wrote: > I would really appreciate if some of the > colisteros could expand and clarify the notion of "the informatic and > cultural content of the commodity". I don't claim to be a "colisteros" (what does that mean?), but ... According to Marx, for a product of human labor to be a commodity it must have a use-value and a value, including an exchange-value. All of these concepts (commodity, use-value, value, value-form) have cultural and historical components. The concept of use-value, for instance, is related to "wants" and "needs" -- yet wants and needs change historically and vary in different cultures. There is also a subjective element in the creation of culture and information in the sense that humans through self-activity (or "autovalorization", if you prefer) can recognize, change, create, destroy, and replace particular cultural and "informatic" understandings and structures. The concept of value requires that commodities represent products of socially-necessary labor time. Yet, what is SNLT? (a complex question, since it has more than one meaning in Marx). What is understood as _socially-necessary_ also has a cultural and historical (and "informatic") component. The above is frequently not recognized in crude physicalist interpretations (or interpretations which don't emphasize the systematic dialectical nature of Marx's analysis). On the issue of "wants" and "needs", see the _Grundrisse_. Jerry --- from list aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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