Cognitive Commodities and the Value-Form

GUIDO STAROSTA

Science & Society

Guilford Prress

Lugar: New York; Año: 2012 vol. 76 p. 365 - 392

0036-8237

The paper critically examines the ?post-workerist? Cognitive Capitalism approach focusing on the claim that the specific ontology of cognitive commodities (involving their costless reproducibility, indivisibility, non-rivalry, etc.) is one of the factors that leads to the obsolescence of the Marxian law of value in contemporary capitalism. It argues that despite being usually presented as self-evident and unproblematic facts and implications of the nature of cognitive commodities, those claims about the crisis of the ?measure of value in social labour-time? rest on a rather crude understanding of the antithetical determinations of the commodity-form as the unity of use-value and (exchange-)value. Whilst acknowledging the descriptive validity of some of the features associated with the so-called cognitive commodities, the paper shows that a more rigorous approach to the critique of political economy can make sense of those peculiarities through the lenses of the qualitative and quantitative determinations of the value-form that Marx presented in Capital.