/lit/ - Literature

>>16225847
SYNONYMS. merit, worth, usefulness, use, utility, practicality, advantage, desirability, benefit, gain, profit, good, service, help, helpfulness, assistance, effectiveness, efficacy, avail, importance, significance, point, sense. informal mileage.

>>16225894
That doesn't sound like a very quantitative unit of measure

I have no value I would be killed if he was in power today

>>16225847
Value, namely the value-form is a relationship between the use-value of a commodity and the exchange-value of a commodity. It is also the general relationship between all use-values and all exchange-values.

Use-value is the purported utility of a commodity. Note that it is *purported* not actual. Use-value only exists for a commodity to be exchanged. A dog has the purported use-value of being meat. On purchase it is discovered that the dog is full of abcesses, and is unfit for human consumption. The use-value was its *purported* edibility *at the point of sale,* not whether the dog was actually useful.

Exchange-value is the commodity (or all commodities) representation in terms of all other commodities. One dog is worth twenty four beers. Exchange-values find their universal reflection in the money form: one dog is worth AUD60.

The dog's value is that it is purported to be edible, and finds its reflection in AUD60, or commodities to the value of AUD60.

The value-form is this generalised relationship, where we perceive human behaviour as labour, and price it per unit. Where we perceive children as costs (instead of free agricultural labour). Where we perceive someone as their assets.

Are you still having problems?

>>16225984
>Are you still having problems?
do you think youve really explained value?
Or did you just give a decent book report?

>>16225847
Isn't the labour theory of value basically value = how hard people worked to produce it

>>16226013
No. The quantity of value present in a commodity for Marxian LTV depends on the socially necessary average skilled labour time present. If everyone only slaughters dogs, and they slaughter a dog in four minutes, and Kev slaughters a dog in three minutes, Kev's dog contains 4 minutes of socially necessary average skilled labour time.

>>16225984
Well the cunt could say which other chapters he's fucken read and which problem he's having.

>>16225847
Marx defines value according to the labor theory of value, which states that the more time you spend on something, the more value it has.
For example, Marx spent a ridiculous amount of time writing things that were overly verbose and objectively wrong, but because he spent a lot of time on it, that means according to him his bullshit is valuable.
Most people instead to see value in terms of supply and demand, and since there was no demand for his shit opinion in the first place, Marx's value is zero.

>>16225984
OP here, I understand that exchange-value is basically price, and use-value is about utility.
But how does Value mitigate the relationship between the two? why can't we just say that value = price for most commodities?

>>16226048
this is a serious thread anon, I expect serious answers from people who know what they are talking about, the twitter screencap thread is on page 2

>>16226055
The requirement to purport utility is important. It is why Veblen Good markets are fairly rare. If we: hold with the volume 1 pretension that for the purposes of argument that price will be exchange-value; and keep in mind that commodities must pretend to be useful until sold; then, we can talk solely about exchange-value for the remaining chapters.

Except in relation to labour-power. Labour-power exerts a mysterious use-value during Production itself. Commodities as objects, or services, are transformed into new material forms by the application of useful human labour-power.

>>16226069
I still don't get it anon, can you perhaps give me an example of this in some commodity market?

>>16226087
All markets in capital are commodity markets within Marxian LTV: the only form present is the commodity form. Commodities aren't bulk undifferentiated goods like wheat, or Singapore Crude, but are all commodities.

Network services, prostitution, education, labour hire, beef carcasses, cock rings.

The commodity is infinitely differentiable because the exact utilities claimed to support some human need (including producing more commodities) are differentiable, and because the variety of productive techniques means someone can produce slow and thus lose money, or produce fast and thus make money, or produce with a machine and get ahead of the Organic Composition curve, or produce with an outdated machine and be behind the curve. The SNALT composition of a commodity depends on skill, expertise, speed, technical composition, state of the arts of tools. Some cock rings cost more because they embody more SNALT (even if this was produced ahead of curve, costing less actual human time). Some embody less (even if they were produced behind the curve, costing more actual human time).

Imagine, as Australian labour markets did, that every worker should be compared to a fitter and turner living in Sydney with 5 years on the job. Non-tradies were cheaper because they had less skill. Professionals were more expensive because they had more skill. For eighty years the Australian government set the wage levels through the Award process, largely by comparing social expectations (socially average) to a clear class of labourer that was widespread. Doctors got paid 5 times f&t. Female cleaners got paid 0.30.

>>16225847
Labor theory of sex

>>16226570
wew lass. Seriously actually read something before posting.

he meant.....GIB ME FREE SHIT NOW MOTHERFUCKER GIB ME IT GIB ME IT GIB ME IT

>>16225847
Basically current reproduction costs. Market prices should converge there but that's not possible since an average rate of profit has to regulate everything. Things won't tend to ever sell exactly there (that's the "transformation problem" criticism of Marx) and it's not empirical but Marx claims value is real and matters in the aggregate since that's what he claimed placed a limit on capitalism expansion since capitalism generates less "value" over time (e.g. look at the amount of GDP that intellectual property which has no real marginal costs makes up over time).
Capitalism should make commodities cheaper and fixed capital depreciate faster and faster until it doesn't work anymore as a social system... most of that is regulated enough today though so it's not as big of an issue as Marx thought.

>>16226037
>If everyone only slaughters dogs, and they slaughter a dog in four minutes, and Kev slaughters a dog in three minutes, Kev's dog contains 4 minutes of socially necessary average skilled labour time.
Kev should technically be paid more in this case no?

I just finished the second part of the first chapter of capital, can someone let me know if im reading this right
>commodities are defined as products people need that are also traded with other products you need
>commodities are split into use value (the literal usefulness of the product) and exchange value (generalised value in relation to other commodities)
>exchange value is decided by an abstracted generalized form of labour, the time spent making it without any relation to the type of labour it is.
>people make commodities less for the use they could have for another person, and more for the fact that they have to make them to get to bargain with other people for commodities they need themselves

>>16227976
No. Kev is paid based on the price of the input costs for his labour. Kev drinks as much VB as his mates and eats as much dog meat as his mates. But because he is faster he lowers the average cost of SNALT for dog kills and earns his employer super profits. On the other hand Davo takes five minutes a dog and his employers make a loss. Even though Davo requires the same VB and meat to survive.

Now if the employers changed the bargain. Say Kev has 18 years and Davo 1. And it takes 15 years to learn to kill a dog. By importing skill assumptions they differentiate the commodities and choose to pay Kev more. Because Kevs union is holding the employers children hostage and sending back one knuckle a day.

>>16225847
value on the theory is the centre of gravity around which market prices fluctuate due to supply and demand. it's an abstraction whose magnitude is determined by the average amount of unskilled labor required for the commodity in question at a given time and place.

okay yea people dont get whats going on here that much

theres two things

1. A labor theory of value
2. a value theory of labor

the first one is derivative a la david ricardo and appears in marx's work to some extent. basically ricardo says price of something is equivalent to labor put into it... but marx takes this further and looks at things like 'abstract labor'

marx cares much more about the value theory of labor, this is how labor is the driver of the economy to him, thus the driver of value... and importantly... surplus value. Marx's teleology is driven my labor....

>>16228544
Yes. Except the use value is purported not substantive. Use value is a belief in the exchangor. Also the composition of labour is more complex in later chapters.

Marx continuously revises these terms by expansion in later chapters due to his methods attempt to ever more closely reflect reality as it goes on.

Good reading. Try the short work “reading capital politically” by Harry cleaver. He argues Marx sets up categories for workers to demolish in class struggle. Namely that all these categories are there to be abolished.

>>16226570
You could've just said you're not familiar with the subject. Or, well, actually read the thread before committing to your knee-jerk post.
Living on assumptions and guided by reflexes is no way to be.

>>16225847
Value is a social characteristic products of labour acquire in a society in which they're produced for exchange, which is quantitatively determined by the portion of the total social labour that the product represents and which therefore determines the ratios at which different products are exchanged in such a society.

>>16225847
I am going to have a shot at this because I had a really hard time understanding this when reading Vol I but then it clicked when reading Vol III and once it did I don't understand why every discussion of this, by /lit/ or real Marxist reading groups is so fucking abstruse, full of SNALT and "he didn't have a LTV he had a value theory of labour" and commodity-form this and that.

The word he uses in German is 'wert', worth. It's not a question of value like "I value Shakespeare but you value football", or "I value a sixpack of beer but you value a gym membership". A lot of critiques of Marx get utterly bogged down in some bullshit on this point. For Marx, 'value' isn't some magical substance that lives in objects (although I understand how some bits of Vol I can be confusing this way), which is often how it is talked about even (especially) by some Marxists. And all that use-value vs exchange-value stuff is like a thought experiment scenario to ease you into it, they aren't real kinds of things that exist.

A better English equivalent might be 'dear', as in "we won the war, but it cost us very dear". He's actually talking about scarcity, how hard it is to get something, rather than how useful it is because it has inherent magic.

Ultimately, everything except the rawest of raw materials (a sharp rock, an apple off the ground) requires labour to produce or make useful. Assuming commodity production (rather than one-of-a-kind items like Faberge eggs whose price isn't linked to utility), even in supply chains where labour is cheaper than material and material is the bottleneck, ultimately the cost of that material is itself determined by the labour-effort required to produce it, distribute it, etc.

To put it another way, a lot of neoclassicals like to talk about "supply vs demand", and Marx has no argument against supply and demand. Marx's theory of value is there to answer the question "but what, ultimately, determines supply?" -- and the answer is the required amount of labour.

This is also why it's a waste of time to worry too much about the intricacies of how one Kev skinning dogs faster than average Bill can throw it all off. It's really simple once you grasp the overall mechanism -- all that matters is how hard dogs are to skin (and to capture, and to breed, and to raise the food for, etc. all the way back) in general across the entire industry, because that will determine how hard it is to get any quantity of dogs to skin in the first place.

In industry and my union I use Kev vs Bill stuff all the time to detect vulnerability in the process of production. If your approaching it as a tool book all these cases are weaponisable.

>>16226055
No value and price aren't the same thing, you got it right the first time.
The production value from the labor and everything else that goes into something like a candy bar is not the same as the price charged. I can charge $100 for that candy or $1 for that candy and the value that went into it doesn't change.

You can get into measuring value in a empirical form but that varies between professions a lot so its hard to generalize what the exact value of 'value' is. But its essentially the cost of all the labor and materials put into a product. At least on a production side.

>>16232472
>>16232472
>>16232472
>>16232472
Reread the bit on how wages are set: the socially necessary price of labour is whatever they can get away with. So in concrete analysis actual wage levels reflect past class conflict *and define skill differentials*. Remember this is only for waged labour. Stipendiaries (not required to produce commodities) and sharers in profit do not produce labour power and therefore aren’t in the skill hierarchy. Employee doctors are worth three fitters. Specialists consulting are not waged labour.

>>16225847
they had peace signs back then?

>>16230516
how many societies exist? 7 bln? I am my own society, and tomorrow I will be different society than today.

>>16225847
The exchange-value of a commodity, which is reflected in its price, is the average labor time need to reproduce its use-value.

>>16225847
Gimme dat fo free

>>16226037
>If everyone only slaughters dogs, and they slaughter a dog in four minutes

How do we get an acurate average of how long it takes to kill a dog? That sounds very impractical to get a value for an item

>>16235158
stopwatch, retard