[Milton-L] Re: authorship and the survival of evidence [was:Milton and Marx]

[James Rovira]

I appreciate the responses, Carrol, and especially the conceptual
clarity and specificity, especially since my reply to Patrick Scott
lacked it.  Of course selling one's product matters--significant
ownership here is of the means of production, isn't it?  The point of
the quotation seemed to me to be Milton's relationship to his poetry
as a commodity.  It seemed from the quotation that Marx didn't think
Milton related to PL in that way.

I don't know that Milton's ownership of PL in his time is quite the
same as an independent physician owning his services.   If he lost
rights to revenue from sales after selling it, his ownership before
selling it doesn't really mean much.   That's the impression I get
from this quotation of yours from an earlier post:

<<Milton, who did the Paradise Lost for £5, was an unproductive
worker. But a writer who does factory labour for his publisher is a
productive worker.>>

The physician owns his labor every time someone benefits from it. If
Milton sold his rights for 5 pounds, then he loses ownership at the
point where it matters -- the sale of the book to someone else.  A
better comparison would be to a musician who continues to own the
rights to his music vs.one who does not.  That's what I'm not sure
about.

I've read descriptions of alienated labor in Marx that include the
idea of enjoyment of the labor.  Much of what he observed/wrote about
was visibly meaningless drudge factory work that, by nature, was
dehumanizing.  But this was just one facet of alienated labor; the
emphasis, as you remind us, is on the economics.

My last sentence was a bit misleading: I didn't mean some kind of
literary assessment of Milton, but an assessment of Milton's practice
-- his relationship to his book as something he owned and then could
sell.

Jim R