I decided to have some fun with arguments being made elsewhere by purposely injecting Marxist arguments into it, to see what might result. Consider the following a thought piece designed to provoke further discussion rather than anything I hold to be the gospel truth.

OK, I had planned on very light (if any) blogging through the weekend, but I did read a post just now on Floor to Ceiling books that made me react just enough to lead to this short post. I'll presume the reader will have taken the time to read the comments, so I won't recapitulate most of the points argued there.

Whenever I read discussions about e-piracy these days, especially in regards to books (in e-book form, of course), I at first find myself wanting to be sympathetic toward those who argue that the "free" reading of stories via Torrent downloads is a bad, naughty, wicked thing that hurts the authors. Then I recall the counterpoints made by authors such as Corey Doctorow, supported by sales figures, that seems to imply that having free e-book editions seems to help the sales of physical copies.

While I'm not wholly inclined to support Doctorow's opinion, as I think he sometimes belabors the point to its detriment, I cannot help but to think of a larger issue here, that of the commodification of literature (click on this link to see how I'm utilizing this term). Too often, people making pro/con arguments regarding torrent e-book downloads seem to conflate value and price. It appears that the crux of most arguments against these free downloads lies in the perceived loss of price (i.e., hypothetical potential earning power lost due to commodity units being available for free rather than at a monetary cost) rather than on any perceived loss of value (how much worth said product provides to the consumer). Although there is a strong, valid argument that can be made about needing to protect the price of a literary product, there seems to be an intrinsic loss in this moral/financial equation.

Reducing literature to commodity exchanges is a very troubling development of the past century or so. Although certainly there is no true ars gratia artis, as a Michelangelo or Leonardo did often work on commission when producing their greatest works, literature as an art (as opposed to literature as a business dependent upon sales figures) has held an intrinsic value that is independent of cost/profit margins for most of recorded history. For some people (and I perhaps am numbered among them), it is almost a desecration to have the art of writing reduced to a commodity that has to be bought and sold in order for it to have any perceived value. Such a view removes the innate value of the art form, placing it among other commodities that are bought, sold, traded, or stolen. Too often we hear of talented writers who lose access to traditional "markets" due to "disappointing sales figures." But what if the issue runs deeper than just how much is sold and how much is "stolen" or accessed without monetary benefit to the writer?

Obviously, writers need to be paid in order for them to maintain a livelihood. The human value of labor, especially when considered in the often-arduous months and years of labor involved in the production of a literary work, cannot be discounted here. What perhaps should be considered more closely is the very model upon which the price/piracy issues depend. If a literary work's value is reduced to being synonymous with its price, then one might be left wondering what the point would be valuing a work that has no extrinsic monetary worth.

Doubtless, some are reading that last point and thinking, "No, I don't think of a work in that fashion!" True, this is but the carrying out of some currents of thought on piracy/literature beyond what most are willing to think about consciously. However, when the price/value gauge fluctuates beyond a certain spot (often dependent upon a consumer's capital expenditure power and other extrinsic factors that act upon the value of the literary product), the "consent" (defined here as the consumer's willingness to agree to the implied terms associated with the use and/or consumption of a product, here a writing available in electronic form) might weaken to the point where the potential consumer either refuses to consider the work in any form or fashion or s/he wants a "sneak peek" to see if the cost is worth it. Most people, at any given time, are not thieves; most people, at certain times, are liable to be momentary thieves or at least contemplate seriously a "theft" of an otherwise unobtainable or monetary value-questionable resource. Jean Valjean, c'est nous, using my poor French.

Of course, some might argue that there are scales and limitations to such arguments and that there might be a few too many sweeping generalizations in the above paragraph. Perhaps, but when the point is to consider the inherent weaknesses in a system that reduces art to something that can be bought, sold, traded, or stolen, what does that say about us when capitalist exchanges have come to pervade even those products of human labor that we might like to think ought to remain above that dirty, mundane business?

Feel free to weigh in below on your thoughts on the related issues. Hopefully, this essay gave some food for thought, not that I would expect most (or even a few) to agree with what I have written.