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Re: [ox] Fwd: Werthaltigkeit von Informationsguetern



On Fri, 3 Oct 2003, Holger Weiss wrote:

* Graham Seaman <graham seul.org> [2003-09-13 16:57]:
On Sat, 13 Sep 2003, Holger Weiss wrote:
get the product exclusively (not GPL'd)? Well, any company would love to
shift off any work to universities as long as the company is able to
sell the product. How does this provide any evidence on the assertion
that the design process is nothing but sunk cost for the companies?

You're completely right, it is only very peripherally connected to the 
main argument. 


(fixed capital circulates more slowly than variable capital, but it also
circulates - designs do not).

Yes, you got me ;-) That's the main problem with my claim that we're
talking about fixed capital when software is used in production. I would
disagree with your assertion that the value of design does not
circulate. But you're right: The key difference is that there is no
physical depreciation. Thus, if there were no moral depreciation, the
value could theoretically be transferred "forever", the transferred
value would therefore tend towards zero for a single product.

I don't think we're ever going to find a 'true' answer to this question
 - whether 'true' in the sense 'this is exactly what Marx intended',
'true' in the sense 'this is provably how the world works', or even
'true' in the sense 'this approach makes the theory completely logical and 
coherent'. Value is a social phenomenon, and social phenomena change over
time, there is no single, 100% coherent, system (at least from my point  
of view - I know some people have faith in various kinds of strucuralism).

So for me the best that can be done is to find an approach which makes 
sense of as much of what's happening now as possible - but this will not
'disprove' other approaches.

So, thinking along those lines, it seems natural to me that where a
system based on exchange value is preceded and followed by systems not 
based on exchange value, at the beginning and end it will be hard to
say exactly what has value and what does not. And that capitalism in 
trying to survive will have to try to enforce the value system in cases
where it clearly is a bad fit - value is something which can be socially
contested (quite dramatically, in the case of 'piracy').

Specifically for software, it also seems obvious that proprietary software
companies put a lot of work into persuading people that they are selling a
commodity, when they clearly aren't - they are getting people to pay for a
license. Why is it so necessary for them to do this? One possibility is
that what they are trying to force to appear as a commodity actually has
no value. In that case, perhaps even the 'moral depreciation' comes from
this pretence. You could say that Word 97 has had moral depreciation
relative to Word 2000 - but it seems again that MS has to deliberately
create this effect by creating incompatibilities which force users to
upgrade. This is not the same as the 'real' moral depreciation of say a
steam engine relative to an electric motor, as can be seen from the fact
that this tactic is beginning to fail - users simply do not believe there
has been moral depreciation.


Design no more creates value than cleaning the factory floor, selling the
product, advertising, etc, etc, all the many other essential,
labour-using, but non value-creating tasks associated with the product.

However, I believe this is the main problem with _your_ point. You are
claiming that the simple fact that a design does not physically
depreciate has the effect that the labour necessary for creating
software is not a value-creating task. The same thing would in fact have
to apply to the labour necessary for creating a piece of hardware which
for some cool reason does not depreciate physically. That's not very
convincing.

If the hardware were a commodity for consumers, it would have value -
circulation of the product ends with the consumer. My house was built
in 1929; I expect it to last long after I die - for me, that's effectively
infinite, but it has value all the same. Commodities don't need to 
continue circulating after sale to have value.

But if the hardware were fixed capital, it would not have value. It is not
taking part in circulation. It imparts no value to the commodities it
produces (don't forget, in this example of 'infinitely usable hardware'
you have given hardware one of the properties of software - and we can 
really have oekonux!). And although it takes labour to produce, once the
labour is completed, it is done forever; it is not part of an ongoing
process.

The specific terminology of 'marginal cost' is post Marx, but the idea
of fixed costs not being taken into consideration in calculating
profit margins etc is older. Marx's theory shares a lot of elements with
the theories he was criticising; this is one of them. Fixed costs are
simply ignored in Marx, as in most large-scale economic theory.
Marx never mentions the labour that went into designing machines
in the factories he wrote about - as a fixed cost, it was irrelevant to
him. The way I would look at a computer is as a generic machine which can
be redesigned to do an infinite number of different tasks. Redesigning
this generic machine is done by writing a program. Once the design
is done, it does not need to be repeated - it is a fixed cost, the cost
does not enter into circulation. The fact that it is very difficult to
fit something like this into an economy based on value is their problem, 
not ours. 

Maybe this is the key difference in our arguments: you are saying that
if a product requires labour in a capitalist society, it must have
value. I am saying that labour is a necessary but not sufficient 
condition; values are only values when they enter into circulation.
Software only enters into circulation in the most limited, artificial
way (via licenses), and millions of 'pirates' say it does not enter into
circulation at all. It has, at best, a very contested value. 


Actually, I think the distinction done by Marx between value-creating
labour and work that is also necessary for creating the product, but not
value-creating, is at least not done very cleanly. The only distinction
that makes sense to me is the differentiation between labour that is
associated with the production of a commodity on the one hand and work
associated with the circulation of the commodity on the other.
Exchanging a product cannot create value. But I have no idea why
cleaning the factory floor or _producing_ software should not create
value.

I think you're right - it was a bad example, and I believe cleaning the
factory floor probably would be value-creating in Marx (cleaning the
advertising office floor would not). 

Graham

Holger



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