/edu/ - Education

marx doesnt stipulate this (since he's a bad writer) but the LTV of which he investigates only concerns certain goods, as noted by ricardo:
<In speaking then of commodities, of their exchangeable value, and of the laws which regulate their relative prices, we mean always such commodities only as can be increased in quantity by the exertion of human industry, and on the production of which competition operates without restraint.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/ricardo/tax/ch01.htm
for this reason, ricardo also says that with monopoly (or "imperfect competition") the laws of value are indefinitely suspended. so marx's theory of value only concerns commodities which may be freely reproduced by labour and which are subject to competition in a market.

This asinine argument is obsessed with the Austrian School definition of price (always returning to "me wantee") and insists you're supposed to automatically accept it after being beaten over the head with enough idiocy. The labor theory of value, and the discussion of value going back to Adam Smith, was about value rather than prices. The prices of things are set by merchants in response to what they understand the respective value of those things to be. Every merchant makes calculations of value, and if they're operating with the same information, they're going to make the same calculation of value based on those objective criteria; that is, they're going to notice that manufacturing some widget requires the same inputs, that the most effective labor for producing those widgets and the most effective system for producing widgets is expected to produce so much under those conditions, that the demand for widgets is no great secret to everyone in the market, that the utilities of these widgets are describable to everyone to the best of their knowledge. That is to say, value is judged by rational agents based on a lot of objective criteria, if it were a question of utility. But, the most relevant problem for the producers is that they require human labor and exploitation for their enterprises to continue as productive enterprises. The entire reason money exists, the reason why we have price tags in the first place, is because this is how humans are exploited, and what humans have to abide until some other system of exploitation is devised. If prices were not related to wage labor or some form of bonded labor (i.e. slavery, which always has definite costs for its maintenance), there would be no real reason to have the intermediary of prices at all.

It gets more complicated when you really think about what is done with money, instead of believing money is literally made of magic. Everything about the asinine Austrian School arguments requires magical thinking on top of magical thinking and insists you have to "respect" any of it. It's absurd if you step away from their retarded shibboleths and ask yourself what truly, really happens in all of the affairs of a capitalist firm and the wider affairs of a market, of society, of the state. On some level, the economic matter is never strictly about money or a wage, and it's never "just a contract". What isn't arguable is that workers are either paid a wage, or the holder of labor has to pay so much to command this labor (i.e. the cost of maintaining slaves). Everything about the Austrian School is about screaming "me wantee" and believing slavery works like magic and works by insinuating that everyone "should" be slaves. It's the reasoning of disgusting thieves who only ever looked for the first excuse to screw over someone else. This system they promote has been a predictable disaster every time it has been tried, like it was in Nazi Germany.

As for the actual question: Marx's law of value pertained to commodities, freely reproducible objects (and so they are not original artworks, unless you have devised a scheme by which "original art" is itself a commodified service to be assigned a price tag, which in a sense is something we have done… and as a result, commissioned artwork has a fairly low going price, dependent on the availability of starving artists who will create furry porn, and ignoring for a moment that furry porn is produced by a cartel of sorts that fixes prices for their own benefit and recognize that they shouldn't undercut their fellow furry porn creators).

Nearly everything about "luxury" goods is explained by the prevalence of cartels and price fixing, which would be the thing Adam Smith calls "a conspiracy against the public, or some contrivance to raise prices". People often try to forget what Adam Smith was really describing, and sometimes Marx himself is doing this or willfully ignoring what political economy entailed.

It should also be remembered that Marx describes the law of value to explain how political economy was nonsensical on its own terms; that if you actually did this, you are missing a lot of very relevant details about what actually happens in capitalist society. Nothing in the free trade theory mentions primitive accumulation, which is why Marx spends chapters describing this process.

Generally though, the reason free trade is allowed, the reason why this system can work, is because price fixing is mitigated and the producers are competing to provide goods for the lowest price, without concern for any external want. Obviously if you can produce goods for cheaper than your competitor, you have an advantage against them. You can sell your goods at the same price as your competitor, who can't do shit against you except try to emulate your ability to produce the same good for cheaper. So, if some starving artist says "I will create furry porn for basically free, as long as I receive a diet of Hot Pockets and am free to make you more furry porn", he's going to have an advantage over a competitor whose needs are greater, say if he has a family to feed. You can see where this heads, once society has degraded enough that the family and even the most basic expectations of human existence can be cannibalized. You're never going to compete with people who live on practically nothing, are used to living on nothing, and have no expectation that there can be anything but this very low level of existence. There will always be an impulse to degrade social conditions to such a level, and even lower. The ideal of the ideologue is to create a world where labor is essentially free of cost to them, and all consequences are pushed on to the slaves, who are expected to live off of nothing but the barest energy required to sustain their existence. The ideal machine would be "null", but obviously humans cannot be labor if they have literally no energy cost to power this process.