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'The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism of the weapon, material force must be overthrown by material force; but theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses.' - Karl Marx
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File: 1763026106311.jpg (11.78 KB, 480x352, petit prince 2.jpg)

 

If the price of something is determined by the amount of human work that goes into it, how does one explain the price of luxury items or artworks (which only require a little bit of work but are overpriced due to the supply/demand imbalance)?

It might seem like a bunch of impertinent exceptions that could be overlooked but
- the luxury industry is far from being marginal
- if the premise that the value of something is determined by the amount of human work that goes into it isn't true in every context, then the whole law of falling rate of profit doesn't hold true in every context either

(It's been 3 years since I last read Das Kapital and I'm too lazy to read it again)

File: 1763043573113.jpg (9.34 KB, 360x346, ricardo.jpg)

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.

File: 1766417770871.jpg (9.34 KB, 360x346, ricardo.jpg)

>>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

>>25537
You're fixated on the goods, but the desirability of the good or a fair calculation of its labor has nothing to do with the value. All of the things you can exchange are only exchanged because there is a market, rather than say outright taking what you want from another person. It falls apart the moment you eliminate all of the niceties of a free market and a society with Laws; and within those laws, price is entirely a question of opportunity. The relations of labor are not reducible to a quantity alone because the laborer wants conditions that are not exchangeable nor replicable. If the worker is unfree, then this arrangement is nothing but slavery, and that's exactly how workers understood their situation. No worker was convinced he was "free", except by comparison to the lowest class who were obviously unfree. The entire price system was an unwelcome presence for the workers, and the cost of even allowing it to continue is far worse than any utility they might have found within the market. So too were the humiliations of the workers intolerable in a way that could never be worth whatever they were "paid", especially with the knowledge that the money was always fictitious and would be arbitrarily confiscated anyway if by some chance you acquired money you weren't "supposed" to have.

People will also buy useless goods purely because of a belief that they are worth something, even if no one will actually buy them. A surplus of dubious product can be sold for no reason other than the favors between producers and resellers, and there is no logic that asserts that the market is particularly efficient at this. The only thing that happens in a market society is that few people actually use the things sold at a market, just like so many don't buy the expensive groceries and most people buy Food Club. You'd have the same problem in a socialist society, which is why every communist society created a two tiered system; one for those favored by the Party, and one for everyone else, with a despised underclass either outright eliminated or shunted to unmentionable places where their brains are chopped up. The latter happened everywhere, but the two tier society is a stark feature of every communist society and it has been intentionally placed there to remind everyone "this never changes". When you see it like that, and see the same thing in bourgeois society, the chief aim of the patricipants of society has nothing to do with anything that was useful, but their requirement to survive a game of sadism and torture that is the common fate of the human race. There is no "other system", and everyone who suggests such a thing is ruthlessly exterminated and mocked because such things are against the human spirit and the core wants of their race. So many have tried, seeing the obvious futility of this situation, yet "this always works" because there are enough people who clamor for blood and torture. Those people only had to select who would be promoted and who was to die, and they did exactly that. It was no more than a matter of time and the inevitable logic of human civilization and the rituals of their race to assert what was "natural", which is really what was imposed by a conspiracy of the sadists. No force in the world could say no to it with any conviction. They could only delay the inevitable since this situation is obviously bad for most of the people, who gain nothing from the torture and sacrifice. Yet, all of the ways money is valued are measurements of torture and humiliation. That is how labor is made to "offer" itself; by torturing and mind controlling the workers into believing any of this is at all a situation they have to obey. The moment that ritual sacrifice ends, everyone would look around, see that the human condition is wholly intolerable, and declare their permanent and irrevocable separation from such a race. The only people who would believe in humanism would be ideologues insisting that everyone must respect an obviously insane system and culture.

It might have been prevented if someone in a position of power really wanted that, if only to preserve something functional for a while, but the only motive for any utility was a pressing fear that required rulers to be sober. If anything good or contrary to the human spirit did prevail in human history, it ultimately arose from a whim or imperfection of the ruling class or a "stain" that had yet to be wiped out, both of which must become inadmissible under all of theories that were "allowed" for humanity. No one is to ask whether any of this ritual sacrifice was worth anything when we could eliminate the obviously guilty parties or simply remove all of the powers they possess by violently disarming them. We do not need a "free society" if this is what humans do with freedom, but it's too late to change that. Even with a free society though, there was still a dim hope that, eventually, the rulers would run out of anyone willing to encourage this behavior and see that the masses were never, ever revolutionary or interested in killing the rulers. Only because of the rulers repeated and flagrant transgressions were the masses pushed to act out of dire necessity, and that problem would be trivially resolved by the rulers simply not attacking us for sadistic pleasure. For a time, that was at least partially allowed, but only because it temporarily facilitated the eugenic creed.
What "should" have happened is an immediate repudiation of the human race in 1945. We had seen enough. It was the only answer, and there was no good reason for the world to enter another phase of war. Yet, that is what happened, and now we must "fight communism" for no reason at the insistence of completely disgusting fags, and they are truly fags. These people never believed in anything but eugenics, and everyone was a partner in it. There was no other idea for humanity, and every such thing was violently rooted out, until those who dissented could do nothing but go mad from the nightmare to come… all for Eugenics. All so that sadistic Masons can keep raping children. That is what it was for. That is the "utility". That is the only utility. The only "pleasure". I don't know why humans think any of their trifling and fleeting sentiments are "pleasurable". If you want pleasure, even exalted pleasure, that is cheap. The greatest pleasure is to simply remove oneself from the predatory society that surrounds them and refuse to participate. You won't "win" and it's "wrong" to refuse to join because some Masons insist ritual sacrifice makes you a man, but none of it ever accomplished anything. Watching a drunken Mason rot away from brain damage due entirely to his own crapulence and the culture that encouraged it showed me that there's no "winning" in such a situation. I'm not even happy to see "justice", even though he's a bastard. I didn't need to "prove the theory" to know that this shit didn't work, because every child can figure it out, even the stupid shits that populate these schools. The only people who win are those who have entirely abstracted the problem and believe that this always works because they willfully ignore the nightmare they created.

Anyway I think this phase of human society will not last too long, despite their proclamations of a thousand year Reich. I give it 40 to 50 years before the next thing starts, and by then there will be no such thing as a "democratic society" and such a thing will be a subject of great mockery. There won't be much of a world, and no one will give a shit about it, but they're going to get the result anyone who isn't a fucktard could see: despotism. And, humanity will see this as the final and correct form of government and rule, with no more qualifications. Congratulations.

>>25573
>You're fixated on the goods, but the desirability of the good or a fair calculation of its labor has nothing to do with the value.
>The relations of labor are not reducible to a quantity alone
the ricardian theory of value carried into marx, is that the reason prices tend toward costs of production (i.e. SNLT) is because of competition, which necessarily occurs within markets. if i have a good, which is unable to be competed for by its sale in a market (i.e. rare paintings), then the law of value is superseded by monopoly, which manually sets prices to increase profits, rather than the market setting prices competitively.
>Yet, all of the ways money is valued are measurements of torture and humiliation. That is how labor is made to "offer" itself; by torturing and mind controlling the workers into believing any of this is at all a situation they have to obey
or maybe class struggle has a history, continuing today, which militantly fights for better conditions? representative liberal democracy is itself largely a medium of this class struggle, which is why parties cluster around socio-economic demographics more than "culture".

>>25358
The value is derived from rent. Someone speculating on a painting is no different than a real-estate agent or an arbitrageur for any other good. The tendency of the rate of profit to fall only applies to the market in aggregate.

>>25575
Also luxury goods and unproductive labor are part of circulating capital. So the value is backed by rent and arbitrage.

>>25537
>cause marxists are illiterate outside of their little book club
<proceeds to link to Ricard on marxists.org

>>25573

>never

<4 times
>all
<7 times
>always
<3 times
>everyone
<6 times
>no one
<3 times


someone's really sure of himself

>>25591
It's eugenics-kun, so yes. His schtick is to pontificate at people and disregard all criticism as a narcissistic coping mechanism due to his abused childhood.

>>25574
You're thinking in circles to "justify" a price which really has nothing to do with political economy. Prices are set by merchants in competition and agreed upon by purchasers, who may haggle over price. There is a long history of haggling and side deals in everything a merchant does, and there is no law by which this process is "solved" or automated because the conditions of haggling are individual and contingent on things that are not themselves predicted and solvable. If you are claiming that you can solve haggling as a mathematical problem and account for all potentials, you are making claims about economic life that cannot be defended and claims about human behavior that require a lot of assumptions that were never part of anything in political economy.

For the worker, none of this has even been a voluntary arrangement. Workers had no rights, political or otherwise, and the idea that they did would be absurd in the 19th century. Workers do not negotiate as if they were equal agents. They have a knife at their throat and are made to dance like monkeys. The interview process is about the same as what pederasts do to coach a young boy when making him a catamite. That's what managerialism does. It's disgusting and no free man would ever think such a ritual is something he would do as an equal partner. Everything about that arrangement is the exact opposite of free agency and designed to be so. So, for the workers, nothing about political economy pertains to them or their struggle. The struggle of the workers is a purely political or moral one, and it has no direct economic value because the conditions workers require for their lives to be meaningful are never translated into money. The workers want to not be tortured, want living conditions of the goods in kind, and most of all do not want any law that suggests that their feelings and thoughts will be automated and decided for them.

I don't think the concept of a free society for the workers are admissible in the 21st century. That's how far gone we are. You can't even say the most basic idea of what that would mean without it retreated to the Malthusian, Satanic principles that now govern human society… at least, for the slaves. For the managers and those who hold freedom, labor is a joke. The present slave system is absolute and dominates everything humans do now, and you keep letting it happen. The idea that there is a "struggle" against this is laughable when you see what has been done to you right in front of your faces, and your response is to insist it isn't actually happening. You're being retarded. If there is a struggle, it won't be a struggle where negotiation or dickering over price is at all possible.

Also "liberal democracy" has nothing to do with democracy or liberalism. That was the code word for this type of technocratic regime that is definitionally alien to anything democracy was. When you have a giant filter placed on the whole society to be allowed to live or speak in any way, when your social role and what you are allowed to do or be is assigned to you by the age of 10, there is no democracy. Such things are very marked departures from the idea that the state or society is constituted from a base of workers or a nation. It is very clearly set up to claim that the ruling institutions decide what you are and if you will be anything, and the institutions decide unilaterally how far you can promote. Every step up the social hierarchy is approved by superiors, who answer ultimately to a small number of people who hold the whole society in bondage. They decide who lives and who dies, and what if anything anyone will have. It really is like that. The establishment exists to ensure that no pesky human agency will or can be relevant. They hate that idea. Whatever agency humans possess can only be effective within limited boundaries that are set, and the objective of the firm is to ensure that no officer can do anything but what the system insists they will do, one way or another. The only use of human agency in that situation is that human agency is the operating system of the slave-human machine.

Anyway, the reason commodities have "set prices" is because there is no great secret about how commodities are produced, and in principle commodities are freely reproducible. The only condition on their price of production is how efficiently they can be built and the cost of raw materials extracted from the land. The labor cost is variable and ideally it will be set to zero (the worker is told they are in debt to an abstraction for perpetuity and that this is "justified" regardless of any material condition, and so the worker's existence is purely a material fact to be set to the operations of the machine). There is no inherent "value of labor" in that sense. All such value would be taken on by the commander of the slave-human machine, and that is what has taken place. Those are the present relations of production, thrown in your face every day to remind you this never changes. I don't know why people insist on this "me wantee" sentimental theory that is at odds with everything the society says about you and what your own theory implies would be the inevitable outcome. It gets crazier the longer the Lying goes on.

If workers were free men with souls and something to live for, none of this arrangement would be tolerated. We would immediately resolve that the hitherto known arrangement of institutions is wholly intolerable and the workers would take back their lives. No pretense of a republic would remain, and this would be a permanent and irrevocable break. There would be no price-setting market in that sense. No one would agree to free trade.

(If you really want to get what Marx was writing with Capital, he was writing a defense of the slave power, because that's what his backers wanted. If free trade is contradictory and Marx makes certain that there is no "other system" based on goodwill or an abrogation of the assumptions that have ruled humanity, the only other system you can have is despotic slavery, the "natural end state" of human civilization according to such a theory… and that theory is picked up by everyone else who believe in the same outcome for their own reasons.

Le merchants rob both the producer and the buyer.


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