At 07:42 PM 8/29/99 -0700, Ian wrote:
>Embodying the use-values of ideas does not change their form[s], nor does it
>render them scarce [they can't be consumed]. It is the legal structure of
>property rights whereby the state gives some the right to exclude others
>from their use that [partially]creates the kind of exchange values they may
>have as commodities and how they may further contribute to the development
>of other use-values.
I'm not sure we really disagree much here, so I will just restate my position. I can neither buy nor consume the fact that F=MA. But I can buy schooling in which I am taught that fact and a book in which I can read it. If intellectual property laws hade been different in Newton's time, I might have ended up being able to buy a limited right to make use of the knowledge of that fact. All of these things are commodities that contain dead labor, that are scarce, and that are consumable. Their use-values are somewhat different, but they resemble each other in that they all allow me to enjoy the benefit of knowing that F=MA -- something very similar to the use-value of the fact itself, if facts can be said to have use-values. That is why I described the creation of the fact-related commodities as a change in form or a replacement of the use-value of the fact.
>What is the other value that appears in association
>with the intellectual use-value? Or, hopefully better, does the value of
>ideas precede [temporally and ontically] their use-value? Do we want to
>avoid instrumentalism in our social epistemology?
I'm using the word value in Marx's sense, "the common substance that manifests itself in the exchange value of commodities." Since objects must possess use-value before they exchange as commodities, value does not precede but follows use-value, both temporally and ontically.
The substance of the value of a fact-related commodity is the labor that went into creating it. This includes the labor of the teacher, the printer, or the clerks and other workers necessary to establish and regulate the legal right to use the knowledge of the fact. It also includes some pro-rated part of the labor used to create the fact itself: Newton's labor and the labor of any other people he may have relied on.
--
As for your proposal to reassert the legal concept of usufruct, I can see two possible applications of it: piecemeal application through things like conservation easments and the like, or grand application through a direct attack on property in land. The former, as applied in the United States today, is a very modest reform of the sort that can do good at times but can often do harm by providing polluters with green cover, by misdirecting the energies of environmentalists, and by recasting issues of environmental justice as issues of preservation, which often takes out both the economic dimension and the radicalism. The latter, grand application, which is probably what you have in mind, is too enormous a reform for me. If you are going to defeat property owners on that scale, why not ablish private property altogether? For me to get interested in this concept, I would have to imagine a middle path, bigger than easements, but smaller than redefining property.
Tom Thomas Waters twaters at panix.com Bronx, New York