[lbo-talk] why Prince is right

[shag carpet bomb]

At 12:19 AM 7/10/2010, Mike Beggs wrote:
>On Sat, Jul 10, 2010 at 7:30 AM, shag carpet bomb <shag at cleandraws.com> wrote:
>
> > When I talk about 'circuitous' I'm talking about the fetishization of 
> "free"
> > such that people no longer understand how they pay for something - like
> > health care in currently existing societies that have "free" health care.
> > There's a story there, ripe for analysis, that a contemporary Marx could
> > examine for the way this fetish is working to obscure the godamned social
> > relations of production. The thing magically lands on the supermarket
> > shelves, where you buy it. No idea or understanding of the social
> > relationships that went on to create that product and get it on the 
> shelves.
> > People - the actual involvement of *people* in the creation of those
> > productions - is hidden from view. When it isn't even a commodity anymore -
> > but really fucking is, just in a very circuitous way - the shit is still
> > going on - the commodity fetishism, only now, really people and the labor
> > they do to create things have totally evaporated from the picture.
>
>I think it's a good point - non-commodity fetishism.

i think stuff we're talking about here (music, software, newspapers, etc.) 
that you get for free is a commodity. i dont' think it's accurate to call 
it non-commodity - which is why i think that a contemporary marx needs to 
analyse it as such - to show that commodities don't have to have a price 
that can be paid for by *money*. you are paying for it with your labor.

As an example Google gave away its 411 service in order to gain access to 
your labor: people got a service that they paid for with their labor. All 
that data about the human voice, all that testing of their voice 
recognition software, was produced and done by people giving Google their 
labor in exchange for a service. It is the exchange of labor directly for a 
service. That information was then used by Google to develop the nifty 
keano coolo app on my android that lets me speak my search query to Google. 
Google developed it's software with the labor of a lot of people. Google 
"paid" them with a service.

Nearly everything that is "free" in this way is really the exchange of a 
service for your labor in a market. That labor is then used by companies to 
develop products that it sells in order to make money. Stuff that is "free" 
is, therefore, a commodity. Absent from the equation is cash money. It's a 
trade, only people don't think of it as such.

People don't think that, when they enter information into Facebook, say yes 
to an app that asks if you will give all your information and your friends 
information to the app, that they are engaged in a transaction, but they 
are. The app is made by a company that invests effort into developing the 
app. They give it away for "free" to gain access to information that would, 
otherwise, costs them a great deal more to gather. They then use this 
information either for their own product development purposes (products 
that they sell) and/or (often both) they sell the information they've 
gathered to companies that use that information to create and market 
products ( that they sell).

I snipped out the rest, but want to address it in a second post b/c it's 
separate.

shag