ABSTRACT
One of the central claims of the “post-workerist” Cognitive Capitalism approach is that the specific ontology of cognitive commodities (costless reproducibility, indivisibility, non-rivalry, etc.) contributes to the obsolescence of the Marxian “law of value” in contemporary capitalism. Although that claim is usually presented as grounded on self-evident and unproblematic facts and implications of the nature of cognitive commodities, those arguments about the crisis of the “measure of value in social labor-time” rest on a rather crude understanding of the antithetical determinations of the commodity-form as the unity of use-value and (exchange-)value. While acknowledging the descriptive validity of some of the features associated with so-called cognitive commodities, a more rigorous approach to the critique of political economy can make sense of those peculiarities through the lenses of the qualitative and quantitative determinations of the value-form that Marx presented in Capital, i.e., through the law of value.
KEYWORDS: Cognitive commodities; Value-form; Law of value; Post-workerist theory