This is going to get a bit lengthy, but I’ll reply to your points in order:

1. “[Re: value of Beatles song vs. unsuccessful band] The point here is that this kind of production is problematic from the point of view of the law of value even before the issue of non-rivalry is raised.” I partly agree that there are issues with value relating to original works intended to produce aesthetic or similar affects in an audience - see the sculptors issue - this maybe an issue with the Work/Labour distinction according to Engels. I.e. the difficulty in valuing the original use values produced by producers of specifically un-average skill and intensity. That said, the difference between the profit generated by Mozart and McCartney is so many orders of magnitude that I still maintain it is only explicable through the technology of recording making conversion of music into an immaterial commodity of the limitlessly replicable form, that makes the most significant difference.

2. The significance of DRM is precisely the opposite of what you’re saying. Certainly as long as immaterial commodities could only be replicated by means of material objects such as paper books, vinyl discs, etc. with the latter having non-negligible individual production costs themselves, the immaterial nature of these products was obscured. Our current digital infrastructure merely reveals what was already there. The immaterial product is characterised by its nature as a pattern form. A pattern form is always unique, irrespective of how many times it is replicated. Your and my DNA, the text of Paradise Lost, the lyrics and music of a “Hard Day’s Night”, the source code of the GNU C Compiler, all of this share this pattern form essence. Having been freed from the material encumbrance of vinyl or tape, DRM is an a posteriori attempt to impose IP rights to charge economic rent by force (of law, backed up ultimately by state violence). (c.f. Lazzarato’s “re-imposition as political command”?)

3. Not sure I follow you on this one…

4. Luxemburg I know roughly, but Grossmann… can’t help on this one either I’m afraid.

5. I don’t think monopoly price applies here. Also I want to emphasise that digital reproduction may have made the state of affairs more inescapably obvious, but I deliberately chose the Beatles example to illustrate the operation of the immaterial commodity in analogue, pre-computer, pre-internet days.

6. Actually, as a side-issue, this raises an interesting point in relation to the movement from formal to real subsumption. In the example given by Marx in the “unpublished 6th chapter” the movement from formal to real is associated with the alienation of the production of use values by employed labour and it’s monopolisation by the engineer/entrepreneur (Ford) or a specialised “labour aristocracy” engineering section of the workforce (Sloan/GM). In either case the move to real subsumption is accompanied by the loss of control of the use value from the rank and file worker. And yet, the characteristics of the new cognitive capitalist labour we are talking about is precisely the reclaiming of the production of use value, design and engineering process, by the employed workforce. For e.g. as software engineers we build systems (MP) operated by the system users to provide service to the customer. Is this not the reversal of the process of real subsumption? Kinda messes up Negri’s pat assimilation of real subsumption and cognitive capitalism into different facets of a single epochal change surely?

The other point is that which part of the musicians, recording studio technicians, studio capital goods, etc. contribute to creation of the recording is entirely moot. The fact remains the result is a single product - the recording - that can be sold limitless times.

7. True enough, but I don’t see how it relates.

8. [on the question of the audience producing part of the value]. Depends whether this is a type 1 or type 2 immaterial product. Of the type where we are talking of a performance - a production of affect in a distinct place and time in which both producers and audience are present and that does not result in a lasting alienable commodity - then clearly both performers and audience are involved in the final affects produced. After all, would you prefer to pay 10# to go and see your favourite band in an empty venue where you were the only audience there, or 12# to see them in a venue crowded with a big audience enthusiatic to enjoy the night to the full? Presumably our bourgeois neo-liberal economist would consider the first option the ideal - the full product for a reduced price without all the nasty necessity of having to collectively share the product. Yet another reason why bourgeois neo-liberal economists have so few friends, I guess :). But in the second case - the case of the transferable (and replicable - see below) immaterial product, then no, I too don’t think the audience is producing value in purchasing a copy of the pattern-form. You could argue that after enough units have been shifted to cover the wages and capital costs of production, plus the socially average rate of profit, then the profit made above and beyond that must be economic rent. However this begs the question of how does this rent relate to surplus value? *Sigh*! Looks like I’ll have to read Vol. III after all (*aargh!*).

I’m aware that this kind of process of point by point back and forth, quickly becomes unreadable. We may be best to start again somewhere else rather than trying to thrash out what are definitely non-trivial questions in one blog comment

NB On the question of the Labour Theory of Value, while I agree with you (and we are far from alone in this) in being unhappy and unconvinced by the glib efforts of Negri at al. to declare its time to “forget the whole thing” and simply move on, I think we have to also keep our ultimate goal in mind. We are revolutionaries not economists: to paraphrase Anthony’s famous soliloquy “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears, I come to bury the LTV, not to praise it”. Ultimately we aim to abolish money and exchange value by a critique both theoretical and practical of it and the capitalist social relations that are intertwined with it. But that critique must expose exploitation not obfuscate it as those who would have us “push through Empire” appear to risk doing.

I have a question though about the argument that present day work is no longer labour. Doesn’t Virno argue this because he, more than the other in this crowd, is preoccupied with the Aristotelian/Arendtian distinctions of behaviour? Labour is simply a translation of poiesis?

But with Lazzarato it seems different. It seems to me that he really states that the activity of, you know, problem solving, “defining and fixing cultural and artistic standards” etc., _is_ labour. And the reason that it really is labour, is not some intrinsic quality in these activities, since he seems to argue that they were not labour when they were the “privileged domain of the bourgeoisie and its children”. The reason does instead have to do with class. The concept of immaterial labour seems in him to fall under the concept of a certain “composition, management, and regulation of the workforce”. Indeed he starts the text with approaching the concept of immaterial labour through “an attempt to define the technical and subjective-political composition of the working class”. Perhaps it is somewhat circular (or at least not very sound methodologically) to start with the concept of workforce and working class, and then define what is labour in relation to these categories (labour is whatever this group in general is preoccupied with, or something like that), which then (via empirical research) come to define their present condition of existence. But the concept of labour is, anyway, not done away with.

And with Negri and Hardt “[l]iving labour is the fundamental human faculty”, so one would guess that to them every possible human society is a “society of labour”.

1. It would obviously be absurd to try and locate the creation of the substance of the profits gained by the sale of a Beatles-record in whatever sort of labour the band was involved in writing and recording the songs. Its difficult to speak of socially necessary labour positing the relation between Beatles and whatever now forgotten band rehearsing next door to them. The labour process of writing songs although perhaps subsumed formally under capital still seems to point out a limit to real subsumption. Which might be a reason why this sort of activity seems to carry a sort of utopian aura in the eyes of so many people. The point here is that this kind of production is problematic from the point of view of the law of value even before the issue of non-rivalry is raised.

2. I’m not sure I’m to comfortable with the distinction rival/non-rival. As a song, or even as recording, the Beatles song is non-rival in the sense that one consumer listening to the record doesn’t exclude another consumer listening to the same record. But as a copy of the record, it is a rival good. And I believe this could be said to be the case even with the purely digital copys bought from a webb-shop. Consider, for instance, the importance of DRM-technologies in such commerce.

3. The value of the fixed sort of constant capital has always been distributed over a number of products. Perhaps what is new with digital reproduction to a certain extent could be conceived in terms of that a larger amount of variable capital turns from a circulating character of capital to a fixed one.

4. The fundamental perspective when it comes to any law of value is, I believe, that of reproduction. Even if piracy partially circumvent DRM, re-investment of capital is sensitive to conventions established by the balance of forces between piracy networks and the state, etc. Of course the record company director will claim they “lost” value due to piracy, but the law of value does not operate at such an “ideal” level that could be lost, even if perhaps it is ideal in another, what might be called symbolic, sense. Does the investment not bring in profits close to social average profit, this capital will be wiped out or directed elsewhere. Does it bring home profits well above social average profit, this production will attract more capital. This sort of rejection of any “realization problem” might perhaps be a bit too anti-Luxemburgian. I’ll have to come back to this in a year or so once I have a better grip on the distinction between the perspective of her and that of Grossmann.

5. And then there is the question of monopoly price, the difficulty of which is perhaps accentuated by digital reproduction, but still a difficulty present well before the talk of any new-economy.

6. I also want to stress a social level of the music industry. I believe it is a mistake to conceive the consumption of a record entirely in terms of a realization of a the musician labour-process, that the sort of intrumentality implied in the concept of labour process solely dominates the relation between musician and consumer. I raise this point because I believe that even if the labour process of the musician is hard to subsume under capital on the level of the “real”, and hence has a precarious relation to the process of valorization, other aspects of the music-industry does not face the same difficulty when it comes to real subsumption. In a way I think it is fair to say that the music industry consumes musicians. In the recording studio the band is like a labour material for the studio technicians, which they labour with by means of the studio equipment. The same goes for the cd-plant, and the distributor and the commercial capital. These instances constitutes large portions of what turns over in the price of the record.

7. I don’t know if it is important, but it might be worth noticing the difference in the composition of fixed and circulating capital in these different instances of the music industry. The capital with the least fixed capital (that is: that capital that has the fastest average turnover-time) is that of the record label. And isn’t it so that this has to do with the precarious character of this investment. It is a matter of getting rid of bad investments fast. And then there is the tendency of spreading the risk of bad investments within merging major labels.

8. The issue that really has to be delt with though, besides the “non-rivalrity” of digital reproduction, is the claim sometimes stated in the debate on immaterial labour that the audience produces parts of the profits of the music-industry, because the sort of labour it takes to be a fan produces the social meaning of certain music and without it there would not be a demand for the records. I’ve heard this argument kicked around, but when I think of it the only non-emaillist-text where I’ve seen the argument stated is in Reluctant Revolutionaries by Johan Söderberg. I thought this was what Maurizio Lazzarato argued as well, but reading his text on immaterial labour again I’m not so sure anymore. Consider for instance the statement that: “The split between conception and execution, between labor and creativity, between author and audience, is simultaneously transcended within the “labour process” and reimposed as political command within the “process of valorization”.” I think one might say that I hold the Lazzarato-line above when discussing the character of the “private labour” of the waitress (and Chris W raised a reasonable question about this). The problem I have with the concept of the (value) productive audience, is that it seems to predicate value-creation on the “demand”-side in a way quite similar to neo-classical political economy. Demand is a presupposition of production of value. But an increase in demand of a product (although it might raise the price of this product) can not by itself increase value on a social level (that is, demand can not by itself increase demand), since demand is measured in money – not only what I want but above all what I am capable of paying. And given the amount of money in my wage, if I prioritize something in my consumption, that implies that I deprioritize something else. It might well be true that the labour of the fan is a presupposition for the profit of the individual company, and I believe this is a growing feature of a lot of commodities. But it is one thing to say that something is a presupposition for profit, and quite another to say that it constitutes the substance of value.

“here is also no necessary analogy between the relations between labour and value, even from the perspective of capital, i.e. from the perspective of the valorization on the market. Capital is not indifferent to the difference between the sculpturing activity of the random happy amateur and that of, say, Martin Sjardijn.”

I don’t know what you mean by ‘necessary anology’. I agree that capital is aware of the differences between qualities of sculptors. But capital’s awareness is linked to marketability - the capitalist qua capitalist wants the sculpture that is the best commodity - not to nonmarketable aesthetic quality (record companies don’t sell albums full of singers who sing like birds in a beautiful way, but sell commodities - if those commodities happen to be beautiful, then capital cares about that only to the extent that it can be made functional to the capital relation). I suspect we agree on all this, that this is obvious, and that I am therefore missing a point somewhere.

Can you explain to me what you mean by the law of value and/or point to a source on that? It’s very interesting but I’m not entirely sure I get it. I’m also not sure I get the argument about real subsumption. Do you mean to say that the law of value only reigns once real subsumption takes place? If this is so, does real subsumption happen at the level of individual firms or as a type of epoch a la Negri? Or, do you mean that the existence of the law of value means that real subsumption happens once the law of value exists? I’m suspicious of real subsumption as Negri et al use the term and they’re the folk I’m most familiar with who used it. To my mind from the perspective of the workers formal subsumption and absolute surplus value are already a change in the labor process. There’s a similar question in this issue for me as above re: the circuit board and the sculpture, the question of which differences make a difference and which are held as indifferent.
take care,
Nate

Labour is, in the first place, a process in which both man and Nature participate, and in which man of his own accord starts, regulates, and controls the material re-actions between himself and Nature. He opposes himself to Nature as one of her own forces, setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body, in order to appropriate Nature’s productions in a form adapted to his own wants. By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature. He develops his slumbering powers and compels them to act in obedience to his sway. We are not now dealing with those primitive instinctive forms of labour that remind us of the mere animal. An immeasurable interval of time separates the state of things in which a man brings his labour-power to market for sale as a commodity, from that state in which human labour was still in its first instinctive stage. We pre-suppose labour in a form that stamps it as exclusively human.

It is not only an expression of, but also a relation to, nature. It seemed to me that Marx was implying that capital was constitutive of such a reflective relation. But it might be stretching it.