File spoon-archives/aut-op-sy.archive/aut-op-sy_1997/97-02-16.202, message 45


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



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