From: Jurriaan Bendien (adsl675281@TISCALI.NL)
Date: Sun Feb 26 2006 - 08:22:45 EST
Well quickly one last shot - you may well be correct that libraries come under attack in various ways both insofar they do not conform to the private profit principle, and because of alternative electronic information sources. When I was in Canada, a friend (who worked as teacher/librarian) also pointed out the disappearance of smaller, proprietor-owned and operated bookstores there. But anyway why should politics be restricted to a 1970s model of it? If a library is attacked by people who want to close them down, and the librarian responds by publishing information which completely discredits the attack, that's a good strategem, I would think. I talked about access rights deliberately, because access rights aren't the same thing as intellectual property rights. Access rights can involve all kinds of (physical or ideal) intermediation between the user and an object of use. As soon as you can no longer freely buy or rent a text or image directly, but have to access it from an electronic device, the possibilities for access rights multiply, since you can stipulate all kinds of additional conditions for access, including the use of the device, and indeed structure the availability or make-up of an information product, in terms of access rights. A popular example is the difference between open-source software and proprietary software, but that's only just one particular case of a more general design phenomenon involving the subordination of use-value to exchange-value. I think this phenomenon becomes increasingly important in modern parasitary capitalism, in which a growing part of national income consists of property income (which, as I have argued, is often poorly reflected in official macroeconomic aggregates). The final "gated community" is an information community in which access is conditional on capital ownership. Although Marx did not analyse communication in detail as a social phenomenon (though he refers to relations of communication), there are now quite a few works about it, for example: Marx and Engels on the Means of Communication: A Selection of Texts. Ed by Y. De La Haye (Paperback - Jun 1980) (a selection of quotes and texts) Mattelart, Armand, and Sieglaub, Seth, eds. (1979, 1983). Communication and Class Struggle, 2 vols. New York: International General. Armand Mattelart & Michele Mattelart (1998), Theories of Communication : A Short Introduction. Sage Publications. Armand Mattelart. Mapping World Communication: War, Progress, Culture, University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Mosco, Vincent. (1996). The Political Economy of Communication. London, Eng.: Sage Publications. Generally, Marx believed that capitalism developed human potential in an inverted or self-contradictory form. Thus, also in communication, the more it is technically possible to send and receive messages anywhere around the globe, the more restrictions are imposed on messaging by commercial principles, and the more communication flows are shaped by commercial principles. However, as I've noted in various places, information is often a highly unstable commodity, precisely because - its commercial value may depend on exclusivity of access, - its value is often context-dependent, - its value may quickly fall to zero, when new relevant information becomes available. Hence the tendency to attempt to secure control over the original sources (or the whole supply chain) of information - the "enclosure movement" in the garden of knowledge... Jurriaan
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