/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.

>>25362
>>25363
what a waste of words.

>>25366
prove him wrong retard

>>25396
he doesnt make a single coherent point to be responded to, i.e. its a "waste of words".

>>25397
I don't believe you can even understand the point. The point is that you're supposing there is some arbiter in Nature assigning these values, when this is all a political calculation made up by humans. Basically, the labor theory from Adam Smith was that none of the capital and stock would be worth anything if there weren't humans working at a basic level, who on some level wanted the products of labor that constitute this capital. People don't make products "randomly" or for spurious purposes, and if they are made for spurious purposes, they typically do not enter economic life. In other words, the management of things and products is much like the management of human beings, i.e. various types of unfree labor. That's why Adam Smith writes that it is command of labor rather than any natural generative power of labor that is valued (and bad economists muddled the words Adam Smith wrote to make bad arguments). Everything from Ricardo to Marx extrapolates based on that assumption that it is labor commanded that is valued, and Marx's contribution to this is the concept of "abstract labor", which if you read Marxism 101 you would understand. What Marx is writing about can quickly become esoteric and something removed from what actually happens; but for the manager of labor, this is what he has to do to exploit labor and keep his firm operational. He has to think in a manner that is increasingly divorced from what the capitalist wanted out of production in the first place, in ways that work against the very system that he agreed to enter as a producer.

uyghas really be out here posting to some retards hoping to get a correct explanation of Capitalism instead of just reading capital

>>25527
The problem with reading Capital is that Marx assumes you know the argument from classical political economy. What Marx is describing is how this law of value appears to the manager. The manager deals with labor in the abstract at the level of the firm and he can only manage it in particular ways. I.e the boss can choose how long the work day is and the compensation for workers, and ask how much more he can get out of workers.

Luxury goods are not freely reproducible in that way. If they were, their price would be subject to competition and they would be cheap. Many luxuries are actually cheap but diamonds are controlled by a monopoly that seeks to keep the price high. That is done by forbidding competition and cornering the market on diamonds. That's an easy problem. It's not solved by utility because diamonds are worthless for that. But there is a way by which these monopolies are established and those monopolies have an outsized effect on what others do on a market society. Who can establish these monopolies becomes clear, and that is the imperial power. Diamond monopolies exist because the British empire likes that monopoly.

>>25536
so, why not just at least read the first chapter of ricardo's "principles" before capital? (oh right, 'cause marxists are illiterate outside of their little book club):
>Utility then is not the measure of exchangeable value, although it is absolutely essential to it. If a commodity were in no way useful, - in other words, if it could in no way contribute to our gratification, - it would be destitute of exchangeable value, however scarce it might be, or whatever quantity of labour might be necessary to procure it. Possessing utility, commodities derive their exchangeable value from two sources: from their scarcity, and from the quantity of labour required to obtain them. There are some commodities, the value of which is determined by their scarcity alone. No labour can increase the quantity of such goods, and therefore their value cannot be lowered by an increased supply. Some rare statues and pictures, scarce books and coins, wines of a peculiar quality, which can be made only from grapes grown on a particular soil, of which there is a very limited quantity, are all of this description. Their value is wholly independent of the quantity of labour originally necessary to produce them, and varies with the varying wealth and inclinations of those who are desirous to possess them. These commodities, however, form a very small part of the mass of commodities daily exchanged in the market. By far the greatest part of those goods which are the objects of desire, are procured by labour,. and they may be multiplied, not in one country alone, but in many, almost without any assignable limit, if we are disposed to bestow the labour necessary to obtain them.
<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