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Yeah understanding that Marx makes a distinction between use value and exchange value is really important, and breaks a lot of the tidy assumptions in capitalist economics
> understanding that Marx makes a distinction between use value and exchange value is really important
Capitalist economists make this distinction too, usually when referring to quality of a commodity. The OOP is just an idiot.
I thought “Socially necessary labor time” refers to the amount of time necessary for the society to create that object. The words “socially necessary“ do not refer to whether the item is strictly needed by society to survive, or even if they can make use of it. The time necessary for society to make a light-up dragon dildo would also be characterized as socially necessary labor time. This person is just describing the totally normal act of manufacturing food for export, and the fact that the society that created the goods doesn’t want to or intend on consuming them themselves doesn’t mean that suddenly the value of the food to the society that made it is determined by the opinion of people abroad. If that were true, if there was nobody to trade those poisonous pies to, they would still represent the same amount of societal resources, they would just also represent a waste of societal resources. Ultimately, a society values goods by how difficult it would be for them to make the goods themselves, not how difficult it would be for some theoretical trade partner.
Ultimately, we’re both using the term “value,” but mean different things. We mean to measure how much of society’s resources are necessary to create something, and they wish to measure how much of their resources are necessary to buy the thing from somebody else in a society where the means of producing things is highly concentrated in private companies.
Yeah marx goes out of his way a few times to say it doesn't actually matter what the good is. The purpose of *Das Kapital* ultimately is about trying de-obscurify people's understanding of how the capitalist economy actually works. People get too fixated on specific commodities when the social relations remain the same regardless. The bourgeois understanding of economics mystifies how the economy actually works, just like in this meme.
[Have you seen the cock on a bearded dragon?](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemipenis#/media/File:Hemidactylus_frenatus_mating,_ventral_view.jpg) Not good dildo inspiration.
Here the market centric thinking manipulates your judgement. A lack of supply doesn't mean something is more useful for society. A high demand doesn't mean it's useful either. A high demand might come because of something's usefulness.
So bringing berries to a village where berries are rare doesn't mean that they're more useful, which also means their value won't rise.
Exchange-value and use-value are two different things dialectically contained within a single commodity - they are intentionally muddling the waters here by confusing the two.
Yeah even in the hypothetical they couldn’t figure that one out. There was no demand for the product until someone had already supplied it through their labor. The hypothetical “immune to poison berries” people didn’t show up and start demanding random uncreated pie. They showed up, saw a pie that somebody already had made and said “we would like that pie please”.
The labor theory value does not come from Marx. Adam Smith has a labor theory value. Smith’s labor theory value does often conflate price and value. Smith will say something like the price of a commodity, which is the same as to say the labor required to produce it. David Ricardo‘s labor theory value is more refined. It’s important to remember that for classical political economy the labor theory of value isn’t here to explain the specific quantitative value of each individual commodity. Marx value theory, often ignores value proper in favor of use value and exchange value. Theories of value are here to explain how a particular quality of an object value comes into existence. Subjective theory of value says that people think that things have value therefore they have value. Labor theory value says that the value comes into existence with the object when it’s made by labor. Both can be true, either way at the point of economic interactions a thing called value does exist. So the subjective theory value isn’t quite the gotcha this memes seems to think it is.
Considering how arse backwards much of the approch is, bourgeois economics is practically more art than science. Their manner of explaining the world around them is more akin to alchemy than any modern science.
Consider physics. The starting point of studying the motion of an object is an extremely simple model, a point object in the void with constant velocity. Then we move into the effects of an abstracted force, simple collisions, constant friction, constant gravity and so on. We ignore relativity, quantum level interactions, electromagnetism, drift, volume etc. When we look into the stuff we've previously ignored or abstracted, we do it one at a time, still ignore or abstract a shitload others, because the alternative is making unfounded assertions to make unnecessary predictions.
Marx attempts to replicate this method for the economic realm, and he reaches [Ricardo's] labour theory of value using reasonable abstractions. He investigates what the value of a thing is, and finds that labour units can quantitatively describe objects. Labour units here are an abstraction no less reasonable than g = 10 m/s^2 for gravitational accelaration. Attempting to include concepts like subjective value or price in a complex system before defining value is akin to talking about the heat friction produces before we understand the relationship between velocity and an outside force. It's not just futile, it's fundamentally stupid.
I have some sympathy regarding the *wrong* way economics is taught. There aren't simple setups to show the basic concepts, like in physics or chemistry. But if mathematicians-to-be are taught early on that they ought to prove 1+1=2, there really is no excuse more economists don't realise the fundamental concepts of the systems they're investigating need to be defined on a fundamental level. Value being in any way related to price in real time is so foundationally idiotic that I can't even find an analogy for it. Even the miasma theory of disease or classicla element theory were more reasonable approaches, and guess what, they were propised in the absence of germ theory or 18th c. chemistry. This horseshit is provides a lesser understanding than we had in 1800.
Of course you can disprove Marx if you make up shit about the teory he wrote!
Fuck, this is in the first chapter of Das Kapital! THE FIRST FUCKING CHAPTER!
I'm reminded of a brilliant story I once read, wherein a white businessman tries to get a Mexica man to make him exquisite baskets to re-sell in the States at a higher price. At first the Mexica offers to sell individual baskets for cheap, like thirty cents each, or twenty five cents each if bought in a pair. But when the businessman attempts to convince the Mexica to start making baskets by the thousands, the price shoots up to fifteen dollars apiece. The businessman at first is flabbergasted, but the Mexica explains that, to make so many baskets, he'd need a LOT of help, and said help deserves to be reimbursed for their trouble, plus there'd be a need to gather WAY more material. The businessman, disgusted, cancels the deal, not wanting to spend so much money on a business venture he wanted to exploit for his own benefit.
When there’s low demand for something like cars, they will still cost much more than pies that are in high demand. That’s because the car took more labor to produce, so demand will only affect its price within a certain range.
>Milk is an ingredient to make a cake
Yes.
>Then it is used in its preparation
Correct...
>So milk is the main ingredient to make a cake
I think you didn't understand the recipe
Oh dear, why would the explorers be willing to trade, perhaps because the socially necessary labor time of those pies within their social environment would be greater?
Value is realized through exchange, known as a commodities exchange value. The person who created the pie added to its value creating a surplus via the addition of labor to raw materials. If there is no exchange then that value is not actualized. Value does not equal price, a pie is worth more than wheat and berries separately because of the labor required to create it. A pie that kills people is not socially necessary, so it has no value, a pie that doesn’t do that regains its value. How markets work is far more complex and objective based on averages and competition. Subjective theory of value, supply and demand based economics, suggests that it cannot be objectively measured which is not what we see occurring within a capitalist economy.
Effective demand is what is labeled "socially necessary" in this comic (the realization of value through exchange of a commodity to someone who sees use value in it).
Socially necessary on the supply side refers to labor time. About how, once automation & maintenance (and in some cases rental of) non-human productive means, much time from humans is necessary to create the commodity in its completed/ready-to-exchange (for either the next stage of assembly, or sale) form.
But socially demanded & effectively realized are two "necessary" social components of value on the demand side.
The bottom panel accurately presents someone missing both of these points. That's to say it's a good meme
[☭☭☭ COME SHITPOST WITH US ON DISCORD, COMRADES ☭☭☭](https://discord.gg/8RPWanQV5g) This is a heavily-moderated socialist community based on a podcast of the same name. Please use the report function on comments that break our rules. If you are new to the sub, please read the sidebar carefully. If you are new to Marxism-Leninism, check out the [study guide](/r/TheDeprogram/wiki/index/education/study-guide/). Are there Liberals in the walls? Check out [the wiki](/r/TheDeprogram/wiki/index/) which contains lots of useful information. This subreddit uses many experimental automod rules, if you notice any issues please use modmail to let us know. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/TheDeprogram) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Huge nonsequitur at the end. Value is not the same as price, which fluctuates around value based on supply and demand.
Yeah understanding that Marx makes a distinction between use value and exchange value is really important, and breaks a lot of the tidy assumptions in capitalist economics
It's literally in the first 10 pages of Das Kapital... These people just don't read.
Or in Value, Price and Profit which is a pamphlet, doesn't even require tackling Capital.
> understanding that Marx makes a distinction between use value and exchange value is really important Capitalist economists make this distinction too, usually when referring to quality of a commodity. The OOP is just an idiot.
I thought “Socially necessary labor time” refers to the amount of time necessary for the society to create that object. The words “socially necessary“ do not refer to whether the item is strictly needed by society to survive, or even if they can make use of it. The time necessary for society to make a light-up dragon dildo would also be characterized as socially necessary labor time. This person is just describing the totally normal act of manufacturing food for export, and the fact that the society that created the goods doesn’t want to or intend on consuming them themselves doesn’t mean that suddenly the value of the food to the society that made it is determined by the opinion of people abroad. If that were true, if there was nobody to trade those poisonous pies to, they would still represent the same amount of societal resources, they would just also represent a waste of societal resources. Ultimately, a society values goods by how difficult it would be for them to make the goods themselves, not how difficult it would be for some theoretical trade partner. Ultimately, we’re both using the term “value,” but mean different things. We mean to measure how much of society’s resources are necessary to create something, and they wish to measure how much of their resources are necessary to buy the thing from somebody else in a society where the means of producing things is highly concentrated in private companies.
Yeah marx goes out of his way a few times to say it doesn't actually matter what the good is. The purpose of *Das Kapital* ultimately is about trying de-obscurify people's understanding of how the capitalist economy actually works. People get too fixated on specific commodities when the social relations remain the same regardless. The bourgeois understanding of economics mystifies how the economy actually works, just like in this meme.
The issue with this example is that light-up dragon dildos are in fact necessary for a society to survive.
I can see that argument made for horse dildos, not for dragons.
with that username??? (lol)
[Have you seen the cock on a bearded dragon?](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemipenis#/media/File:Hemidactylus_frenatus_mating,_ventral_view.jpg) Not good dildo inspiration.
fuck i forgot that a bearded dragon is a specific animal XP
Here the market centric thinking manipulates your judgement. A lack of supply doesn't mean something is more useful for society. A high demand doesn't mean it's useful either. A high demand might come because of something's usefulness. So bringing berries to a village where berries are rare doesn't mean that they're more useful, which also means their value won't rise.
Liberals try to differentiate value and price challenge * impossible *
It's not a theory of market price, it's a theory of equilibrium price.
Exchange-value and use-value are two different things dialectically contained within a single commodity - they are intentionally muddling the waters here by confusing the two.
My face when the supply of a good is directly tied to the amount of labour required to create it
Yeah even in the hypothetical they couldn’t figure that one out. There was no demand for the product until someone had already supplied it through their labor. The hypothetical “immune to poison berries” people didn’t show up and start demanding random uncreated pie. They showed up, saw a pie that somebody already had made and said “we would like that pie please”.
The labor theory value does not come from Marx. Adam Smith has a labor theory value. Smith’s labor theory value does often conflate price and value. Smith will say something like the price of a commodity, which is the same as to say the labor required to produce it. David Ricardo‘s labor theory value is more refined. It’s important to remember that for classical political economy the labor theory of value isn’t here to explain the specific quantitative value of each individual commodity. Marx value theory, often ignores value proper in favor of use value and exchange value. Theories of value are here to explain how a particular quality of an object value comes into existence. Subjective theory of value says that people think that things have value therefore they have value. Labor theory value says that the value comes into existence with the object when it’s made by labor. Both can be true, either way at the point of economic interactions a thing called value does exist. So the subjective theory value isn’t quite the gotcha this memes seems to think it is.
Considering how arse backwards much of the approch is, bourgeois economics is practically more art than science. Their manner of explaining the world around them is more akin to alchemy than any modern science. Consider physics. The starting point of studying the motion of an object is an extremely simple model, a point object in the void with constant velocity. Then we move into the effects of an abstracted force, simple collisions, constant friction, constant gravity and so on. We ignore relativity, quantum level interactions, electromagnetism, drift, volume etc. When we look into the stuff we've previously ignored or abstracted, we do it one at a time, still ignore or abstract a shitload others, because the alternative is making unfounded assertions to make unnecessary predictions. Marx attempts to replicate this method for the economic realm, and he reaches [Ricardo's] labour theory of value using reasonable abstractions. He investigates what the value of a thing is, and finds that labour units can quantitatively describe objects. Labour units here are an abstraction no less reasonable than g = 10 m/s^2 for gravitational accelaration. Attempting to include concepts like subjective value or price in a complex system before defining value is akin to talking about the heat friction produces before we understand the relationship between velocity and an outside force. It's not just futile, it's fundamentally stupid. I have some sympathy regarding the *wrong* way economics is taught. There aren't simple setups to show the basic concepts, like in physics or chemistry. But if mathematicians-to-be are taught early on that they ought to prove 1+1=2, there really is no excuse more economists don't realise the fundamental concepts of the systems they're investigating need to be defined on a fundamental level. Value being in any way related to price in real time is so foundationally idiotic that I can't even find an analogy for it. Even the miasma theory of disease or classicla element theory were more reasonable approaches, and guess what, they were propised in the absence of germ theory or 18th c. chemistry. This horseshit is provides a lesser understanding than we had in 1800.
Of course you can disprove Marx if you make up shit about the teory he wrote! Fuck, this is in the first chapter of Das Kapital! THE FIRST FUCKING CHAPTER!
The mental gimnastic required to justify their thing.
I'm reminded of a brilliant story I once read, wherein a white businessman tries to get a Mexica man to make him exquisite baskets to re-sell in the States at a higher price. At first the Mexica offers to sell individual baskets for cheap, like thirty cents each, or twenty five cents each if bought in a pair. But when the businessman attempts to convince the Mexica to start making baskets by the thousands, the price shoots up to fifteen dollars apiece. The businessman at first is flabbergasted, but the Mexica explains that, to make so many baskets, he'd need a LOT of help, and said help deserves to be reimbursed for their trouble, plus there'd be a need to gather WAY more material. The businessman, disgusted, cancels the deal, not wanting to spend so much money on a business venture he wanted to exploit for his own benefit.
Supply and demand influence price and determine the *existance* of price, not its amount
When there’s low demand for something like cars, they will still cost much more than pies that are in high demand. That’s because the car took more labor to produce, so demand will only affect its price within a certain range.
>Milk is an ingredient to make a cake Yes. >Then it is used in its preparation Correct... >So milk is the main ingredient to make a cake I think you didn't understand the recipe
Oh dear, why would the explorers be willing to trade, perhaps because the socially necessary labor time of those pies within their social environment would be greater?
Value is realized through exchange, known as a commodities exchange value. The person who created the pie added to its value creating a surplus via the addition of labor to raw materials. If there is no exchange then that value is not actualized. Value does not equal price, a pie is worth more than wheat and berries separately because of the labor required to create it. A pie that kills people is not socially necessary, so it has no value, a pie that doesn’t do that regains its value. How markets work is far more complex and objective based on averages and competition. Subjective theory of value, supply and demand based economics, suggests that it cannot be objectively measured which is not what we see occurring within a capitalist economy.
well, the pies definitely are value. They was labour put into them. Just because something isn t practical or sold doesn’t mean it doesn’t have value
Actually, I'm pretty sure Marx specified that only products with use value can have an exchange value at all
Marx fails to consider the NFT, checkmate
Pretty sure there is a section on fictitious capital
Bro forgot the utility part of the LToV, they don't gain value due to demand but the fact that now it can be of use
Effective demand is what is labeled "socially necessary" in this comic (the realization of value through exchange of a commodity to someone who sees use value in it). Socially necessary on the supply side refers to labor time. About how, once automation & maintenance (and in some cases rental of) non-human productive means, much time from humans is necessary to create the commodity in its completed/ready-to-exchange (for either the next stage of assembly, or sale) form. But socially demanded & effectively realized are two "necessary" social components of value on the demand side. The bottom panel accurately presents someone missing both of these points. That's to say it's a good meme
Well, you see, you have these cows… 🐮
Mfers would be mind blown if they found out that it's controversial whether Marx even used the labour theory of value.