All because it does not come off an assembly line or workbench doesn't mean it's not a product - say, a theatre production could be defined as a product as much as anything else. -what- a product is may change, the fact that we can trade in it...I'd say the same "rules" apply.
Copyright/intellectual property may be the new counters for trade; they are products to be bought and sold, from the patents for genes to the enforcement of copyright on digital disks, pace the Disney act coming to a hard-disk near you now, through to the ip on poetry. I guess a Marxist theory (and I admit my view of Marxism is -extremely- naieve) might be applied to such a system.
The fact that the West has given up production in it's own back yard doesn't mean a lot; we've just exported it the "developing" world. Lets face it, this is the Victorian age with knobs on - the Western underclass suppressed into a simulcra of "decent behaviour" by the panopticon and the dirty work done abroad out of sight, out of mind.
Roger.
> However I'm not suggesting that genetic science is the way forward for a new
> critical apparatus to replace the Marxist tatters, Marxism is now a
> religious movement - followers have faith in the system. But I am suggesting
> it might be one way. Even a capitalist theory of poetics might be
> illuminating! Marx afterall is a capitalist in that his theories are derived
> from and are wholly determined by that systemic view of capital. As we enter
> an age of non-production, where the developed world (shall we say) ceases to
> produce "things", but trades in knowledge and metadata I don't see a place
> for Marx. Where more and more outputs are not the product of labour and
> cannot be commodified and are transnational . . . I'm waffling so I'll stop.
> Marxist limitations are defined by species: the system puts humans at the
> centre of things, and we're just not that important.
>
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