[lbo-talk] Lefty library of pdfs

C W Sedley cwsedley at gmail.com
Tue Sep 11 20:46:57 PDT 2012


On Wed, Sep 12, 2012 at 1:26 PM, andie_nachgeborenen <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> wrote:
> to submit absolutely to the values of capital, which seems to be your and cg's idea.

I think you might have confused me with another person (unless this other person is emailing you offlist). If that's the case, just to clarify, I'm not proposing we sit back and accept that technological change means writers must never get paid. Capitalist production constantly makes people unemployed or unemployable. It reduces the amount of direct labour necessary to produce social wealth, but instead of manifesting as an increase in leisure, it manifests as a social crisis. You can neither hold back the tide (as publishers want to, by endlessly extending copyright terms and infecting everything with DRM), nor solve it on an individual level (as Ebookcollective implicitly think you can).

Writers, like teachers, must be paid, as long as money exists. But, like teachers and nurses, they need not be paid by their customers. I think this has always been basically the leftist approach to cultural production; the fact that culture can now be reproduced infinitely for free has forced the issue within capitalism.

Cheers

CWS



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