Thanks Tom. We had a discussion of longshore work and leisure in a recent 
thread that you may or may not have read, 
https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/34256.

> On Dec 26, 2024, at 12:21 PM, Tom Walker via groups.io 
> <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> The spectre of "plagiarism" haunts Marx's appropriation of the idea that 
> wealth is disposable time for several reasons. First, Friedrich Engels 
> brought up the matter of the pamphlet that "Marx saved from falling into 
> oblivion" in the context of refuting accusations of plagiarism from Karl 
> Rodbertus and his acolyte. Later, along with Karl Kautsky, Engels again 
> refuted Anton Menger's charges that Marx was deliberately deficient in citing 
> his sources. Oddly enough, Engels and Kautsky ignored Menger's disparagement 
> of Engels's earlier claim that Marx's views on surplus value had been 
> influenced by the pamphlet "which," according to Menger, "contains only faint 
> hints of the theory."

I enjoyed the article a lot. This paragraph led to me to consider the topic of 
plagiarism and socialism. I think that intellectual property is anathema to 
socialism and should fade away with private ownership of the means of 
production. But the preservation of personal property is consistent with 
socialism and in Marx's works. So I think there are two or three different 
things.

1. Creations such as writings that get sold on a commodity market. Theft is 
prosecuted under capitalist regimes as theft of property, and there is also 
censure and loss of future work and revenues from buyers such as publishers and 
commodity consumers.

2. Related to 1 is the niche in the capitalist social division of labor for 
thinkers, scholars, intellectual leaders and others where professional 
reputation is so very important to a person's employment.  There is a lot of 
competition for these jobs and some in the academy would smear a person's 
reputation to get a corner office. I expect this regime to disappear with 
capitalism; people may persist in being petty and narcissistic but that won't 
be an advantage to feeding oneself.

3. Writings, theories, and other works might be considered as personal property 
but unlike a dwelling, computer, or chainsaw, this personal property is 
aggregated from the efforts of many others, including language, which evolves 
with generations and led by women in a society, according to many. I think in 
this context, "plagiarism" is central to human creation.

Mark



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