Re: [OPE] intermission

wpc wrote:
> One must distinguish 3 things here:
> 1. The labour required to produce an individual isolated piece of
> knowledge
> 2. The labour required to reproduce this knowledge
> 3. The labour requird to produce knowledge as part of an organised and
> repetitive process.

Many problems with this. For example, there's no such thing as 'an
individual isolated piece of knowledge', because knowledge builds on
knowledge. Suppose you write this novel called Ulysses where you pull
together all sorts of ideas accumulated over your lifetime, mixed-in with
ideas borrowed from other authors - going back at least to Homer. When was
the labor of writing this novel performed, and who actually performed it?

Such labor IMO has no value (though of course it has a use-value). There's
no such thing as the average amount of labor-time needed to produce a novel
or to invent a microchip. Our 'knowledge economy' might well assign a
*monetary value* to it, but that's a different matter.

Paula

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Received on Wed Nov 4 17:38:07 2009