Marx’s social analysis of value and Big Pharma. Rethinking the social determinants of value in cognitive capitalism

Marc-André Gagnon
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Marc-André Gagnon: Carleton University

European Journal of Economic and Social Systems, 2011, vol. 24, issue 1-2, 119-136

Abstract: By analyzing the capitalist dynamics at work in the knowledge-based economy, cognitive capitalism has shown that the classical laws of value creation do not hold anymore. Rethinking the laws of value, however, is no easy task. The first section of this paper reconsiders Marx’s analysis of value, and demonstrates that Marx struggled by trying to mix two distinct and incompatible conceptions of value: the embodied labour approach and the social analysis of value. The paper argues that the former must be abandoned and that we need to focus only on the latter in order to better understand how value is being produced. To analyze the social production of value in cognitive capitalism, the second part of this paper builds on the case of the global pharmaceutical sector.

Keywords: Cognitive capitalism; Marx; social analysis of value; pharmaceutical sector; innovation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: B14 B31 B51 F23 L65 P12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
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