This is a bit rushed and like a lot of my posts you’ll probably notice I reach the limit of my own understanding and resort to speculation and merely point in a direction of interest as I can’t explain it.
B0ycey wrote:@Wellsy, I have been spending my time on another forum recently as the user's there a much more up-to-date on current affairs than PoFo. I will still come on here to see if anyone has written anything interesting such as you have now from time to time. I only tell you this as my responses if directly aimed at me won't be as frequent as they once were.
As for this thread, I vaguely remember it. It is a shame VS isn't around anymore as Agora was always my favourite forum and there simply isn't the users who care about philosophy like you do now and he did then. But my understanding on price and value is down to the diamond water paradox and not Marx as his writings on the matter were conclusions for explaining alienation and oversupply. But that isn't to discard anything he says on the subject as he was indeed true and I cannot fault the quotes and conclusions that he wrote that you have provided.
I understand and I am patient. If we continue this conversation and it doesn’t get too time consuming for you, it’d probably still be a bit of fun to see how it goes and hear your thoughts as I like to bounce them off of you. You make for actual and good conversation.
Oh so you were wanting to examine the explanations for why water is so cheap comparatively to diamonds.
I wouldn't really dismiss the principle that utility is a factor in value, but it hasn't got the same forces behind it as in regards to price. That is to say you might desire something more if you cannot possess it and as such some people might attach value to that desire. But I would say that desire would be more of a factor in what you are prepared to pay for that possession and if you cannot afford something you will instinctively value what you are able to possess more instead. In other words, you might desire a Porsche and would pay more for that desire than you would for own car at home, but because you can only drive your car due to it being what you can afford, you care more about that car being vandalised than some showroom Porsche.
I think utility only relates to use-value which is something that isn’t specific to Capitalist production but is true of humanity’s labor upon nature throughout human history. To which we have created new needs that aren’t natural in the sense that they were a given from nature but are our own making even if we don’t understand how they work ie the need for money.
Indeed, the crude impression I take from Lacanian view of desire is that it is excessive, that you can get what you need but not what you want. That the starving man imagines not just bread and butter to survive but the most lavish of food and in mass amounts. It’s the difference between wanting water to quench your thirst and wanting a coke or pepsi. It goes beyond need.
I would wonder how one’s sense of money and what it affords continues throughout one’s life and what one desires. Like my father’s upbringing in intense poverty has given him a persistent anxiety about losing it, my brother in-law was adamant of buying a house because he was moved around so much when his family couldn’t afford rent. And just now I’m purchasing a watch so I can keep the time at work throughout the facility and I resisted the more expensive watch, keeping in mind not just the item itself but the price because I didn’t feel like the object justified the money for it based on my sense of how much money I have and like to spend it, although could easily afford it.
And I’ve seen a point made that the desires we have are very situated in a structural way despite the asserted conflation between what the capitalist and worker desires when they come to market. The point being that we know when a worker gets extra cash there are very clear needs/wants that they’ll realize with their money compared to a capitalist reinvesting in their business or purchasing luxury goods. Not sure if it is the case, but apparently neoclassical economics doesn’t distinguish this sort of thing as it doesn’t identify classes but individuals in a atomistic sense and presumes the rationality of capitalist relations in the psychology of the individual rather than social beings within the particular relations of capitalist production.
But in regards to being willing to pay for more for what you desire, I would think it interesting to investigate how certain status items become so expensive although they don’t seem to be that much more elaborate than other products on the market. Like Air Jordans or Dre’s Beats or even iphones these days.
https://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/l/a.htm Nowadays, many people say that “Marx’s theory of value is out of date” by which one can presume is meant “value is no longer determined by the quantity of labour-time required for its production”, for Marx only claimed to describe the dynamics of social relations of the bourgeois society of his day, not to have constructed an eternal scientific theory. The question remains though: is labour-time now irrelevant to value determination? Have we changed our values in this respect?
For example Nike shoes, produced by sweated labour in “free trade zones” by people who do not earn enough in a week to buy one pair of the shoes they produce in five minutes, while Michael Jordan is paid more than the entire Indonesian labour force for lending his name to the product.
Firstly, integral to this trick is maintaining the separation between the workers in these countries and workers in the country where the shoes will be consumed. The act of exchange is an act of measuring the value of one person against that of another. Within bourgeois society “the notion of human equality has already acquired the fixity of a popular prejudice” but it is a fact that this notion does not yet extend from an imperialist country to people in the “Third World”.
“The secret of the expression of value, namely, that all kinds of labour are equal and equivalent, because, and so far as they are human labour in general, cannot be deciphered, until the notion of human equality has already acquired the fixity of a popular prejudice. This, however, is possible only in a society in which the great mass of the produce of labour takes the form of commodities, in which, consequently, the dominant relation between man and man, is that of owners of commodities. [Capital, Chapter 1]
The labour of an animal or a slave and equally that of a distant foreigner is consumed as such, adding value according to the cost of acquiring it, and does not create labour. Insofar as these countries become part of the same market and merge with the working class of the imperialist countries and enjoy the same rights and standard of living, then this aspect of the issue will disappear.
Further however, Intellectual Property laws ensure that it is not possible for anyone else to make a Nike shoe – a sneaker, for all intents the same, but a copy, not a Nike, not a sneaker with the Nike brand name. Consequently, the equivalence of labour, of the content of socially necessary labour, is indeterminate. Adam Smith put it:
“What everything is really worth to the man who has acquired it, and who wants to dispose of it or exchange it for something else, is the toil and trouble which it can save to himself”,
and if there is no way of getting a Nike shoe other than buying one off Nike, then the question is: exactly what need is being fulfilled by buying a Nike shoe? What other equivalent means is there of satisfying this need? Obviously it is not a need that can be fulfilled by just any sneaker, and:
“A commodity is, in the first place, an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another. The nature of such wants, whether, for instance, they spring from the stomach or from fancy, makes no difference” . [Capital, Chapter 1]
So the fact is that the young person who purchases a Nike sneaker is paying not for the few minutes of labour involved in gluing together the pieces of rubber and plastic, but for the “image” or “aura” surrounding the Brand name which is far more costly.
So it would seem that the claim that the labour theory of value is no longer applicable is misguided; what has changed is the nature of human needs, which in this postmodern world, are very different from what those of the world in which life hinged more around food, warm and security than image, and the manner of their satisfaction. For example, if one determined the value of two hours spent in a cinema watching Moulin Rouge without taking account of the complex emotional and cultural qualities of the images and story line of the movie, and the labour-time involved in producing that, it would be quite impossible to understand what the moviegoers were paying for.
This I don’t quite understand although I get the change in the human needs but not the relationship exactly of how people’s different labour is socially valued. Like how back in the day a woman or a black person’s labor wasn’t socially equivalent to that of a white man until there were the liberation struggles. There is still a status effect from a lot of the divide despite formal equality in law but that there could be such disparity between the value of labor between some peoples not based on education/skills and such is not understood by me or how exactly the new need for fancy shoes acquires such high value.
Wonder what your take might be on this dynamic of brands and celebrity image making something more expensive because it satisfies a social want/need as opposed to a biological need.
On this regard, this is an issue with Capitalism, or to be more specific over production. Where the forces of Supply and demand are manipulated by producing more than we need. This only supports the notion that they are interchangeable so I would agree. Although on this point I believe Marx was trying to argue in terms of the labor we need to excert in order to understand the true value of something and not necessary that supply determines value.
Well as far as I can tell from summaries of Marx, supply and demand are merely a means to change the allocation of labour within the division of labor within society. It is a signal after the capitalist’s commodities have either succeeded or failed to realize their value on the market of what they should do in their next production cycle.
I totally agree with what Marx wrote. And again addresses why price changes. There is a sense in his writings on emotional attachment to the value of something being lost when producing for someone else - which is true. But that is because it is the labor that is of value to the worker and not the attachment of something he will not ever use.
Well that is the alienation part, you don’t go to work of your own drive to do the actual work itself necessarily but in order to get a paycheck so you can then do and get the things you actually want. This is an indifference to what one produces at work because it is the capitalist’s product. Although I think this gets more complicated where some people do find work somewhat satisfying even amidst some of its stifling elements, where they do derive some intrinsic satisfaction from the particular task itself whilst also getting paid. This is that balance between being paid enough and work that is satisfying enough to feel like you’re doing something humanly worthwhile and as such take pride in one’s work.
I would agree with your conclusion in regards to surplus labor being a factor in the price of an item. And that additionally profit is required to determine the true value of his labor in regards to the price of that item which won't reflected in his paycheck. But it doesn't really address the value of things. Air for example doesn't require any labor. Its abundance make the price of air as zero. Yet what value do you put to air where oxygen is required to keep you alive?
Well yes the use-value of air is immense and is a natural given from earth, something noted by Marx. And you ofcourse come to desire it greatly as you no longer able to breathe.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm The use values, coat, linen, &c., i.e., the bodies of commodities, are combinations of two elements – matter and labour. If we take away the useful labour expended upon them, a material substratum is always left, which is furnished by Nature without the help of man. The latter can work only as Nature does, that is by changing the form of matter.[13] Nay more, in this work of changing the form he is constantly helped by natural forces. We see, then, that labour is not the only source of material wealth, of use values produced by labour. As William Petty puts it, labour is its father and the earth its mother.
Although in terms of something actually coming to market for trade, this is where things like the diamond/water and stuff whilst seemingly natural products take a lot of effort. To drink water from a random puddle or stream is free, but to put in the infrastructure or transport in bottles and so on requires labor, just as wood whilst natural requires labor to transform a tree into the wood. In fact one could labor as such for one’s own need without ever entering the market such as with farmers who own their own means of production and land and thus can provide for themselves. But exchange-value never enters because it’s purely for the use-value and not for trade in which it has to equalize with other commodities in some way in order to be comparable for trade.
I think more and more perhaps you’re interested in the psychological interest of why something acquires a use value which might make it interesting as to why somethings on the market acquire a value where they seem quite useless in a practical sense but they do meet some social need whether as luxury items and the sort. Like how do certain social needs develop in human beings which haven’t existed in the outset and how we then go onto satisfy those needs through our labor upon nature and within very particular production and social relations.
By and large I would agree that money and price are merely a method to find value in exchange. That is to say exchange value and not value itself. Where the simplicity of exchange is more quantifiable with a medium such as currency and that exchange is done by something we know as price. But again it doesn't determine value. Money is after all a concept. If it didn't exist you would still value water over diamonds because of necessity over greed. But due to the abundance of water and rareity of Diamonds, you would still exchange more for the possession diamonds than something you can get yourself down the river.
Indeed, the price is a signal that should approximate or serve as a proxy of a things value although it isn’t value itself but a quantitative form of value. And indeed, there would be no thought of price and exchange values without a market or without a currency such as money which has become so universal that all commodities are put in relation to it.
It is interesting to see that even using the ideas of production, the same conclusion can be reached. As I said, there is nothing that Marx has said that I don't disagree with. But it is almost impossible to explain value in production. That is it is Labor itself that is value to an individual and not the item he makes with his labor. So to try and explain a link to production and surplus labor to price and value and whether they are interchangeable might explain why price changes depending on the production of quantity made but not the value itself. For that you have will have to look the Labour theory of value done by contemporarys before Marx as Marx has merely used their ideas to reach a conclusion rather than explain why price and value are interchangeable.[/ QUOTE]
Again I think with your point about the value of labor itself as distinct from the object sounds like you’re interested in the very contradiction Marx identified in the commodity and and wished to explore where it is both a natural and social product and where value seems to be a social relations although not solely that as it is based in material relations of productions also.
So the use-value of things is very critical, they must satisfy a human need and want otherwise they’re without value, but the social relationships organized within the relations of production seem to play some part in establishing value as the unity of use-value and exchange-value.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/pilling/works/capital/pilling5.htm#Pill7
https://www.marxists.org/archive/pilling/works/capital/ch04.htm#4.5
And this is the very complex and dialectical part of Marx’s work it seems, he doesn’t one sidedly emphasize commodity’s as the creation of use-values and meeting human needs but he doesn’t one sidedly emphasize the exchange value of commodities either, where the value is some sort of suprasensous embedded in material things such that we confuse ideal properties within material objects as belonging to the objects themselves or we simply disavow them as in the case of those who describe money as solely an imaginary sign of value in recognizing it has no use-value in itself but losing sight of the real world relations which allow it to constitute the form of value and dictate production.
[url] https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenk ... /ideal.htm[/url
Evald Ilyenkov’s summary of ideality is quite pivotal to this in the sense that the social connections and activity that underpin a thing give it’s ideal character such that it’s not the whim of an individual mind and can’t be wished away. People attempt to articulate this in talking about our collective agreement and imagination to give money value but it’s not dependent on anyone’s will but in the relations which already govern our lives and we are born into. Money really does have value within our system as much as the ancient gods were quite real to the people who believed in them and not in terms of something of their mind but a product of the society, something above any individual consciousness.
To which in trying to explore the social relations and relations of production, the unity of material forms with their ideal qualities and so on, Marx didn’t subscribe to a labour theory of value as the predecessors exactly as much as he criticized them and the reification of their concepts hiding the real relationships which give meaning to their categories of political economy.
Something at the moment I’m looking to explore further is the connection between labor, exchange value and value as there is a connection established between these which isn’t clear as it’s got the Hegelian dialectical method underpinning it.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/rubin/abstract-labour.htm
I’m seeing more the relevance of Ilyenkov’s point about ideality and how the essence of things is based in social relations and can’t be found by abstracting a material object from its real world relations because it then simply becomes an empty sign. And it’s still not clear to me how labour determines value exactly.
And it does seem that Marx has some very nuanced distinctions which can appear to be the same as use-value is often confused as exchange-value or ignored in many thinkers and then he sometimes even speaks of value when speaking of exchange vale although it is the unity of use-value and exchange-value. Then there is “the form of value, the substance of value and the magnitude of value.”
But all this gets way over my head and seems I just have to study Marx really and enter the debates once I’ve stablished some familiarity.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/For%20Ethical%20Politics.pdf#page90
-For Ethical Politics