Cognitive Capitalism and the Value-Form

GUIDO STAROSTA

University of Sussex, UK

Congreso; International Symposium on Marxian Theory annual conference; 2009

The paper subjects to critical scrutiny claims by "Cogntivists" about the impact of the growing hegemony of cognitive commodities on the fundamental ‘laws of motion’ of capitalist society. 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. The paper thus provides further arguments against the thesis of a crisis of the ‘law of value’ as the dynamic principle presiding over the contradictory movement of contemporary capitalism.