this is my first time really hearing about this, from what i have read it sounds pretty moronic as a theory but most commies i ask question to just call me an moron and don't really challenge my claims.
the only instance i see labor actually adding value to the product would be when the labor is advertised like how people have those "hand crafted" shit on things which makes it more expensive because it feels more natural but even then that just adds value it doesn't add value that is dependent on the labor put in. also how would you calculate the value of a product based on the hours put in? like what is the rate and does it vary depending on the product?
if i literally spend hours making a pile of shit vs having someone else who can shit at a faster rate take a shit, does that suddenly mean that other pile of shit is less valuable?
i just don't see how the labor put in determs the value without the buyer actually deciding it does and we can see nobody gives a shit about that unless there is empathy involved and even then they aren't valuing the product more they are basically giving a donation
am i misunderstanding something here?
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 Ape Out Shirt $21.68 |
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Value is subjective.
None of the posters below this will ever be women.
subjective? can you elaborate?
NTA, but the value of an object or service varies greatly from person to person. For real world example, I'm sure you've at least heart of expensive brand-name shoes like Nike's and the like. Whether or not $500 is a good price for a pair of tennis shoes is an entirely personal judgement when there are other shoes that are as good or better for less money. From there you can apply this thinking to anything you'd care to think of.
>Whether or not $500 is a good price for a pair of tennis shoes is an entirely personal judgement
this completely misses the point. the fact that it's worth $500 is not personal judgment
As the consumer and buyer, yes it is. If you don't think the $500 is a good price for that pair of shoes, you don't have to buy them. Some person might want to pay $1500 for the shoes, so for them $500 is an absolute bargain they'd be crazy to not take.
>If you don't think the $500 is a good price for that pair of shoes, you don't have to buy them.
no shit. but they're still $500 even if you don't buy them. that's because their value isn't determined by some rando's personal judgment but by objective facts operating on the world scale
What "objective facts"? (you stupid piece of shit)
(frick you)
>talking to the marxist greentext troony
this is all he does, ever. you'll never get real answers, only greentext replies that keep the conversation going forever by failing to clarify anything, because all hes interested in is showing off his wikipedia knowledge (to himself). he needs to keep it going forever, so he doesn't actually want to convince chuds of anything. he wants more replies like the one you just gave
has also admitted to being trans btw
>never getting real answers, talking just to talk
Keeping in the marxist spirit
ultimately the quantity of labour necessary to produce them relative to other products
>has also admitted to being trans btw
always great to learn new lore about me. please tell me some more new facts about myself once you're done jacking off to troony porn you obsessed cuck
>Take for instance a company which pays workers less than the real value which is generated by their labor. In a marxist society, those workers would instead be paid equal to the value they generate.
this is completely wrong. in a communist society 1) workers don't produce value, and 2) even if they did, they couldn't be paid the entirety of what they produce, because there are many deductions that society must always make from its product before distributing it to the individuals that produced it:
>First, cover for replacement of the means of production used up. Second, additional portion for expansion of production. Third, reserve or insurance funds to provide against accidents, dislocations caused by natural calamities, etc...
>There remains the other part of the total product, intended to serve as means of consumption.
>Before this is divided among the individuals, there has to be deducted again, from it: First, the general costs of administration not belonging to production. This part will, from the outset, be very considerably restricted in comparison with present-day society, and it diminishes in proportion as the new society develops. Second, that which is intended for the common satisfaction of needs, such as schools, health services, etc. From the outset, this part grows considerably in comparison with present-day society, and it grows in proportion as the new society develops. Third, funds for those unable to work, etc., in short, for what is included under so-called official poor relief today.
they don't have value without any work. if there was an abundance of strawberries growing on freely accessible common land, then the economic value of strawberries would be quickly reduced by means of competition to just the labour it took to collect them and bring them to market (plus standard profit), with the supposed intrinsic value of a wild strawberry nowhere to be found. this is common sense.
>For example, upgrading an engine in a car is a laborious task that can increase the value of the whole car, but at the same time wrecking the car with a baseball bat is "labor" but decreases the value of the car
do you really think Marx wasn't aware that one can destroy a valuable thing with effort? actually?
pretty much. it says that over time products are relatively priced according to their relative cost of production, which reflect the relative quantities of the total labour of society that they require to reproduce. it's basically common sense, which is why it's so funny to see people completely misunderstand it and then get so up in arms about their own intentions.
>it says that over time products are relatively priced according to their relative cost of production
This is empirically and objectively wrong though. They are priced according to demand with a supply floor. Anything which has a value independent of labor cannot be said to be a labor theory of value. The theory you're putting forth here is not LTV, it is just a supply-side elaboration of modern preference theories, because in order for commodities to be produced marginal demand must equal a positive marginal profit (in other words demand determines value and quantity of supply, the "labor value" is merely the lower limit of marginal profit).
demand and supply depend on the cost of production. also I'm saying that relative prices of products are determined by the relative amounts of labour necessary to produce them. you can label it whatever you want, but it remains the same thing OP was attempting to get at
Making everything subjective can bleed into metaphysics and morals and destroy a society. That's what's meant by cultural marxism
I read a bit of Mises and I don’t think he is actually that bad now, pretty IQfy.
I'm probably a commie, as I'm from a left leaning family, on a country that's been run by a Socialist party from most of my life.
I really don't understand on the best terms what you are asking, so i'll just go by parts
>the only instance i see labor actually adding value to the product would be when the labor is advertised like how people have those "hand crafted" shit on things
Economically speaking, product Value is not restricted to the product. When you go to the supermarket, the cashier is adding value to the product, as they are providing their services.
>how would you calculate the value of a product based on the hours put in?
You don't. Efficiency beats hard work. Think of a youtuber who spends a whole week making a 10 minute video, which will get say 20k views. Compare that to some thot who does a tiktok in 2 minutes of her dancing and gets millions of views. Views serve the purpose of measuring the value of each video. So, no. There is no hourly rate for value. The thing here is that the Value is being determined by something outside of the product - a market maybe, and that is how the value of a product is defined, by demand and supply. Regarding labour, this law also makes sense, but there are further regulations, like minimum wages, which you know how it works, but also how much value the labourer makes on their time. It is probably hard to estimate exactly how much that is, but you can imagine that this goes into the balance sheets when calculating the budget for a company. The profit must supersede the wages AND give the company a desirable margin of profit. Of course, it is on this last part that the Commies tend to get triggered, because they thing that, in every instance, the division of profits isn't fair.
>When you go to the supermarket, the cashier is adding value to the product, as they are providing their services.
the education of "actually existing socialism", everyone
You think not? I think that their value consists on building an experience for the costumer and whoever put the cashier there believes that the choice of having a person there would help you choose that place instead of another, which implies that there must be some value to their work
Well, break it down. Commodities are produced by labor and resources (pulled of the ground) and combined into products which then eventually make it to your store shelves. At each step of the value chain there's additional value added which one reason why a pair cargo jorts made for basically 25c in Bangladesh (add in the cost of cotton + labor) sells for $30 in a store in Illinois when you add in each step of the way including transport and then final realization of the sale through the cashier. But each step of the way, a little bit of profit is taken off the top.
One implication of this is that outsourcing low-value-add industries makes logical "sense" in capitalism if profitable value realization becomes impossible (such as if wages have risen too high) in the rich countries.
It's also why Amazon is so immensely profitable since they're basically sitting at the top of the value chain in a semi-monopolistic position and are taking a cut from the final realization of sales for... everything... while also doing various things to undercut competitors which sell similar products through the Amazon interface.
Now, you might say "well Amazon has never made a profit." Tesla has a gigantic stock market presence, and it doesn't make a profit. But what's really going on here is that there's enough financial trickery involved now that the profits are "concealed" so the government won't tax them, so Apple pretends to make its money in Ireland, and their profits are simply pretended not to be profits and paid out in the form of interest (which is an expense).
>how would you calculate the value of a product based on the hours put in?
why would you need to do that?
>like what is the rate and does it vary depending on the product?
it varies depending on the complexity of the labour. this is a simple observation based on the fact that if you take very labour-intensive products (to exclude other factors), then those that take X hours of very simple labour that requires no special training will be consistently cheaper than those that take X hours of a very complex labour that requires a trained labourer.
>if i literally spend hours making a pile of shit vs having someone else who can shit at a faster rate take a shit, does that suddenly mean that other pile of shit is less valuable?
it means that both are less valuable. if the price of shit remains above the necessary labour, then capital will come into the shit industry and people will start producing more shit, causing its price to come down to match the new value. this is also very obvious.
>i just don't see how the labor put in determs the value without the buyer actually deciding it does
if buyers decided prices, then everything would be free. but things aren't free, because there's a limiting factor: when the producer sells, he must generally get back at least as much as it has cost him to make the product, otherwise he would not be able to produce for long. and this cost ultimately corresponds to the share of its total labour that society dedicates to acquiring this particular product.
>and we can see nobody gives a shit about that unless there is empathy involved and even then they aren't valuing the product more they are basically giving a donation
I have no idea what this is supposed to mean
>When you go to the supermarket, the cashier is adding value to the product, as they are providing their services.
they aren't. a cashier is performing a circulation function, so they're deducing from the value appropriated as the producing capitalist as profit, not adding value
people will generally pay for things in proportion to the amount of labour society needs to dedicate to making them.
how can you say something like your last claim in the age of NFTs, onlyfans etc.?
with no issue at all, because I said "generally". it's true that 1) speculative assets, and 2) things with severely restricted supply, will both have prices above that. but those categories stand for a minuscule part of total production of society, so what I said remains true generally true for this production.
>"Society" doesn't dedicate labor, individual people and businesses do.
people and businesses are in their essence elements of a world system of division of labour, so their market actions contribute to a unitary, society-wide effect, by which they're also conditioned from the start
>And there is no fixed relationship between how much labor goes into something and how much it costs.
no, but there's a fluid relationship
>The market dictates all of those things.
the market is a medium through which they are dictated, but their source is in the constraints of production relative to social need for all the different products
>people will generally pay for things in proportion to the amount of labour society needs to dedicate to making them.
"Society" doesn't dedicate labor, individual people and businesses do. And there is no fixed relationship between how much labor goes into something and how much it costs.
The market dictates all of those things. Your theory doesn't map it in any consistent manner.
> it means that both are less valuable. if the price of shit remains above the necessary labour, then capital will come into the shit industry and people will start producing more shit, causing its price to come down to match the new value. this is also very obvious.
Are you saying that the entire “Labor Theory of Value” is the idea that products will not be priced at less than what it costs to make them? Really? That’s it?
With enough energy I can make anything human labor can without any labor.
All value is derived from energy not labor.
The commies are simply right. Their solutions may not work but the problems they point out are very real.
The problems of capitalism can be spotted by anyone who exists in the system. I don't know why people get on their knees for Marx when it's plainly obvious.
Not so plainly obvious when he wrote Kapital
Their analysis of everything is wrong
LTV is typical. Value is what someone will pay for something, no amount of prolix logic torturing changes that.
>labor theory of value
Value is subjective.
>am i misunderstanding something here?
Yes, Marx is not a "LTV theorist." His theory of human labor (creative and re-creative activity that constitutes both material objects and social relations) is part of his philosophical sociology or anthropology. His critiques of the categories of capitalist political economy, e.g. the way it constructs labor and value, are meant to show that the capitalist system of production (of which political economic theory is the ideal/formal expression or self-conscious form) inevitably gets into contradictions because it falsifies this underlying, occluded, real form of human sociality and labor.
The abstract presuppositions of bourgeois political economy, about what the "timeless truths" of human social and economic interaction really are, are both unjustified (they are simply assumed a priori) and ultimately lead into self-contradiction, for example when the presumption of laborers meeting in an initial ideal state "freely agree" to exchange the "value" of their labor, and from this initial state the entire ACTUAL system of commodities and commerce and capital is then derived, and then in this ACTUAL living state of a real economic system it is found that the exchange of labour/value is always profoundly unfree (because conditioned by economic factors). In this sense Marx is actually combatting classical labor theories of value.
Land > Labor
What is this doing on IQfy?
Offending you?
As much as any off-topic thread does, yes
The idea is not that your labor intrinsically has value just because its labor. The argument comes from the fact that, without labor, there could not be capital in the first place, so capital must be subservient to labor, not the other way around.
Take for instance a company which pays workers less than the real value which is generated by their labor. In a marxist society, those workers would instead be paid equal to the value they generate. You might object that the company could not grow without surplus capital generation. This problem is solved by the workers (who choose to) reinvesting their labor in the company, and gaining stake of it as a result. When the workers who have taken the most risk by investing in the company have sufficient shares, they can retire from work and live off the proceeds of their investment; they can also choose to create more companies with their money and hire people to work for them.
Actually, that thought experiment started to go in a weird direction near the end. Just don't think about it so hard. You're being underpaid, okay?
HIYAHH!
>am i misunderstanding something here?
That value isn't the same thing as price, and there are different types of values
>earth and plants have value without any work
>can be improved with work but already have value
Refutation?
I'm not well versed in Marxism or anything economic for that metter, but if you want to hear my midwit take, I think Marx wasn't entirely wrong with the idea that labor creates value, but he doesn't realize that value is dependent on many factors. It's better to think that labor is a transformative action, not an additive one. By performing labor on inputs, the output can increase or decrease the value relative to the input. For example, upgrading an engine in a car is a laborious task that can increase the value of the whole car, but at the same time wrecking the car with a baseball bat is "labor" but decreases the value of the car.
the labor """theory""" of value was already BTFO by actual economist years before Marx jotted in down after drunken stupor. pic related
LTV was created by Adam Smith, but it's been refuted by modern economics due to having no empirical (predictive) value.
People in 2012: man ten years from now is gonna be nothing but foxes performing at the absolute highest level of what a human is able to execute! It will nothing but zero to deaths and foolproof flowcharts and punishes!
2022: Link vs DK grand finals 🙂
Lincoln in the bardo
labor itself is subject to supply and demand, that's why we keep having lots of immigration, to bolster the supply of labor, suppressing wages, which is good for corps; but ideally one shouldnt resort to having a huge labor pool, since the idea from the industrial revolution is to make production more efficient via mechanisation, allowing real wealth per capita to increase; which is what we as people care about. if you have a huge cheap labor pool, it reduces the incentive to innovate (that's perhaps why for example the chinese did not industrialize for so long-- there were too many piss poor people to exploit)