Date: Wed, 23 Jul 1997 20:40:09 -0800
From: djones-AT-uclink.berkeley.edu (rakesh bhandari)
Subject: Re: M-TH: Re: Info Revolution


James Heartfield notes:

>productive labourer. None of this bears on the example, musicians
>recording scores for reproduction on CDs. The CD market is a productive
>industry, meaning that it is productive of surplus value, and hence
>there labour, too, is productive - with the proviso that it must
>represent a tiny proportion of the value embodied in the CD, since the
>work of one recording must be spread over thousands of CDs.

But what a day Bohm-Bawerk would have had with this! No need to refer to
golden meteors, fine aged wines and rare art works--the prices of which
obviously exceed the labor time embodied in them. Well, Marxists could
argue then,as did William J Blake, that such exceptions could luckily be
put aside as unrepresentative of specifically capitalist production--which
is Marx's real object of investigation, given his scientific principle of
historical specificity.

But no luck this time, the CD is one of the many mutant children of
capitalism. If, as James claims, the value contributed by the musician must
be spread over thousands and perhaps a golden million of CDs, then this is
to claim that, for all practical purposes, the musician produces no value
per unit at all. But James does not admit to this absurd conclusion.


How could this be? Why isn't the value produced by the musician simply the
product of the number of CD's sold and the difference between what a blank
CD would sell for and what it sells for after the musician's tune has been
imprinted on it?

Why should value contributed simply be determined by labor time, as if
Marxist morality actually ruled the bourgeois marketplace? It would seem
that the musician creates much more value than the labor time she has put
in, including all the rehearsals and revisions (if you must).

Perhaps one could argue that the CD prices would come crashing down if the
technology was freely available to easily reproduce them. As Manuel argued
in the Digital Recorder (essay submitted to marxism international months
ago), it would then be the law of value which explains the attempts to
suppress such digital technology and the war against pirating and copyright
infringements (note the attempt by American lawyers to rewrite copyright
laws in India presently). Again, the law of value will have shown its
regulative function not in market prices per se but in the
countertendencies it has called forth.

Rakesh





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