Comment 33235

By LL (registered) - website | Posted September 04, 2009 at 19:03:26

Once again, I'm proposing that people on this site qualify their use of "libertarian" with either "left" or "right." There are two axes on the political spectrum, not one.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Europe...

Having gotten that out of the way, I'd like point people to some of the "left-libertarian" currents surrounding this issue. One of the most intriguing schools of thought to tackle the issue of value and its distribution in the "information age" is the autonomist-marxist tradition. Hardt & Negri's widely read "Empire" deals with it. If you can get past the difficult language. Another book that I've heard is good, but havent read, is "Cyber Marx" by Nick Dyer-Witheford. Of course, it's available free online:)

http://www.fims.uwo.ca/people/faculty/dy...

Then there's the Italian thinker/activist Bifo, who was in Hamilton recently.

http://www.generation-online.org/p/pbifo...

When you read this autonomist stuff, you quickly realize that the labour theory of value is far from refuted (however morphed it is temporally and spatially). From there, it doesn't take too long to realize that the ones who've been "stealing" all along is the ruling class.

Another classic text is Murray Bookchin's "Post Scarcity Anarchism", which was arguing way back in the early seventies that the sheer productive capacity of cybernetics and other new technologies had created the "potentiality" of making scarcity - and along with it property and markets - superfluous. Kind of prophetic, I think, when you see the difficulty of enforcing the "commodity form" on many informational goods.

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