Science & Technology

October 11, 2011

The church of commodity fetishism and the order of Saint Jobs

This article will appear in the November issue of The Spark

In Marxist theory, commodity fetishism describes the mystification of social relations between people to objectified relations between things. While the actual value of a product is equivalent to the amount of labour that went into it, products are seen to have a greater value than they actually do. Its because of this that products can be sold at a price much higher than they cost to produce, the difference between the actual use value of a product and its price is surplus value, value that is expropriated by the owners of the means of production.

Marx took the term fetishism from the concept of objects being seen to have some mystical proprieties, such as those objects used in religious ceremonies. There are situations where commodities seem to embody both these types of fetishism; “These products have significant emotional value, they have sentimental value, they’re connected, if you will, to the bloodstream of the person who’s likely to be the purchaser,” those were the words of Michael Bernacchi, a marketing professor at the University of Detroit Mercy commenting on Apple products after the death of CEO Steve Jobs.

Continue reading “The church of commodity fetishism and the order of Saint Jobs”

May 17, 2011

Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Amendment Bill: A Challenge to Democratic Norms

This article by guest writer Lindsay Breach will appear in the June issue of The Spark
The Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) is a trade agreement between New Zealand, eight other nations, and the United States. Of particular concern to this article, is that the agreement promises to introduce a strongly U.S. influenced intellectual property regime to New Zealand. Already, this influence has been felt in the shaping of copyright legislation as evidenced by leaked cables indicating the industry is willing to pay $533,000 to fix “key gaps in intellectual property rights enforcement”. The lesson: it appears our legislation can be bought.
Wednesday, April the 13^th was a black day for democracy in New Zealand. The Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Amendment Bill was rushed through under urgency, which had been previously reserved for Canterbury earthquake related legislation. This Bill had been postponed due to previous public outcry and was highly contentious law. It seemed particularly insulting to Christchurch residents, the victims of the February 22^nd Earthquake, because their suffering and the nation’s state of emergency had seemingly been trivialised.
The Bill introduces a ‘guilt upon accusation’ infringement notice three-strike scheme. This scheme dresses up a civil action, between two parties, as a criminal offense. The copyright holder can request an Internet Service Provider to send an infringement notice, with or without good cause for suspicion, to an account holder. After three strikes, the account holder can be taken to the Copyright tribunal. The burden is on the account holder to prove their innocence against the allegation. Continue reading “Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Amendment Bill: A Challenge to Democratic Norms”

September 14, 2010

The Politics of Facebook

From The Spark September 2010
Byron Clark (Workers Party, Christchurch branch organiser)
New Zealanders love Facebook. Many will talk about how much they hate
it, but the numbers show otherwise. One in four New Zealanders is a user of Facebook, for those aged 25-34, its one in three, and for
those 15-24, its nearly three in four. Much of the media commentary
around Facebook has ignored the social context in which the social
networking website has grown. The majority of New Zealanders work for
a living, and the nature of work in the 21st century makes previous
‘offline’ social activities and communication harder to retain. As The
Spark has noted, about 36% of full-time male workers and nearly 19% of
full-time female workers now work 50 or more hours a week. Almost
16.5% of full-time male workers and almost 8.5% of full-time female
workers actually work more than 60 hours a week. Work hours are longer
than the average in the traditional blue collar jobs; Over half of
agricultural and fisheries workers and over a third of plant and
machine operators and assemblers work more than 50 hours a week. Continue reading “The Politics of Facebook”

February 21, 2009

Oppose “guilt by accusation”

One week from now New Zealand’s new copyright laws will come into effect, including the “guilt by accusation” clause (Section 92A) meaning Internet Service Providers will be forced to take down internet connections and websites of anyone accused (not convicted) of copyright infringement. The Workers Party is opposed to this clause and supports the protests against it that have been occurring. As well as section 92A we support repealing the parts of the law criminalising circumventing the so-called “Technological Protection Measures” on media such as DVDs, something we have covered in detail here.

April 10, 2008

Cracking down on user rights: NZ’s new copyright laws

– Byron Clark

The Copyright (New Technologies) Amendment Bill was passed into law earlier this week, the following is a slightly edited version of an article published in The Spark in Feburary 2007 after the bill passed its first reading.

On April 7 the Copyright (New Technologies and Performers Rights) Amendment Bill was passed into law by a 111 to 10 majority. The bills aim was to bring New Zealand’s terribly outdated 1994 copyright act into the 21st century, and makes some progress in that it decriminalises the increasingly common practice of copying your CD collection to a portable MP3 player (however it fails to to extend these same rights to other media such as DVDs).

Continue reading “Cracking down on user rights: NZ’s new copyright laws”