Just an observation/realization….

Thanks for the Locke Carter reference. I hadn’t seen that text but want to check it out.

So for Marxist economics versus neoclassical economics, you have the tension between valuing labor and valuing the commodity. Neoclassical economics says it’s all about supply and demand: how much people are willing to sell or buy a product for. In composition, that becomes a weird fusion of the product-not-process idea of writing — formalism and such — with social constructionist epistemologies. Discourse communities understood as forms of niche markets. (See Locke Carter’s recent collection, Market Matters, for more on this perspective.) But with Marxist economics and its focus on exploitation, well, nobody wants to see student labor as in any way valuable, so we haven’t been able to account for appropriation at the level of process, as you point out.

Here’s how I might begin to categorize various forms of appropriation in the classroom.

Ungraded private journals: Independent transaction at the point of production. The student appropriates for herself the value of her own writing.
Ungraded blogs or web discussion boards: Communal transaction at the point of distribution. The student contributes value to the broader community of the classroom; the classroom and the student both appropriate the value of the writing.
Writing work performed for a research assistantship: Market or feudal transaction at the point of distribution. One could view the student as either purchasing her own future status in the field, or else as being exploited and having her work harvested for diminished returns by a senior scholar in a relationship of unequal power.
Graded research paper to show mastery of a topic: Independent transaction at the point of production; market transaction at the point of distribution. The student harvests the knowledge for herself, but purchases a grade via her mastery when she submits it to the teacher. Its value does not circulate beyond that point.

The problem shading all these nuances of value is that neither Marx nor his inheritors — in this case, Resnick and Wolff and Gibson-Graham — adequately account for the non-scarcity of information as an experience good. Marx never imagined an information economy, and Resnick and Wolff and Gibson-Graham have thus far been greatly (and appropriately) concerned with problems of who makes what and who gets what. For that reason, they haven’t really addressed our discipline’s central problem of reproducibility, which to date has mostly played out in the plagiarism debates, but also deeply complicates their analysis of the cycle of production and distribution.

Maybe what we need to ask, then, is this: how do we describe or characterize the transactions that take place at the point of reproduction, in addition to the transactions that take place at the points of production and distribution?