(Thread IKs:
dead gay comedy forums)
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the elephant in the room is that funco pops have a use value
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Mar 7, 2024 04:10
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The Voice of Labor posted:the elephant in the room is that funco pops have a use value Artificial demand, a feature of capitalism intrinsically connected with commodity fetishism, creates conspicuous consumption, which is indeed an use-value. The far subtler and clever trick here is that this "artificial" use-value has an inherent exploitable property of speculative appreciation, which creates an exponentially greater exchange-value. Incidentally, this is how we get the commodification of art and similar situations
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Mar 7, 2024 04:40
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The Voice of Labor posted:the elephant in the room is that funco pops have a use value you can turn them into your local recycling center for $0.05 a pop
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Mar 7, 2024 04:42
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BillsPhoenix posted:But only after consumption? Coats don't have a use value, coats are a use value. So as long as the coat exists the use it has is clothing a human being, sheltering them from the elements.
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Mar 7, 2024 09:11
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Let me rephrase. We have population N. For simplicity, disregard wants, we assume each person only needs 1 coat. N+1 coats are produced. N coats all have a use value. Does the 1 extra coat have a use value?
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Mar 7, 2024 17:09
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yes
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Mar 7, 2024 17:14
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That makes no sense, why? And to make sure, I'm assuming time is fixed, and these coats can never be damaged or lost during this fixed moment in time. The extra coat can protect someone from rain, but everyone already has a coat to do so. If the extra coat has use value though, shouldn't it be quantifiable? That specifically is the part tripping me up.
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Mar 7, 2024 17:21
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BillsPhoenix posted:Let me rephrase. No, because the coat is a use value. Can you use the coat to shelter a human being from the elements and/or do other coaty things with it? (I dunno fashion or whatever) Then it's a use value. Stop trying to force marginal utility and poo poo like that into this and just accept that when Marx uses a term he is using it according to the definition he has provided for that term. Trust me, our boy Karl is very meticulous about providing definitions. BillsPhoenix posted:That makes no sense, why? It makes perfect sense. The coat is a thing that can be used to shelter a human being from the elements. Whether or not anyone is actually using it in that capacity doesn't change that it is a thing that can be used to shelter a human being from the elements.
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Mar 7, 2024 17:21
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A slave obeys, a man chooses to have only a single pair of socks.
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Mar 7, 2024 17:23
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BillsPhoenix posted:That makes no sense, why? because marginal utility is not use-value. Those are two entirely different things.
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Mar 7, 2024 17:23
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Like my dude, I own a hammer. It's in my shed. It's been there for a really long time because I'm lazy and have two left hands so whenever poo poo needs done around the house I tend to hire a professional instead. But that hammer is perfectly servicable as a hammer able to drive nails into wood. If instead of owning a single hammer, I owned 500 hammers, more hammers than a person could possibly need in a lifetime, each single hammer would still be perfectly servicable to drive nails into wood. They'd each and every one be a use value. Actually to carry this through. My coat is a use value and my hammer is a use value. But my coat's use value is sheltering me from the elements and the hammer's use value is driving nails into wood and I dunno what other poo poo people who use hammers get up to with them but it's all that too. So how many sheltering people from elements is equal to one driving nails into wood? The answer is that that's a nonsensical question and you can't compare use values with one another in this way. Orange Devil has issued a correction as of 17:27 on Mar 7, 2024 |
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Mar 7, 2024 17:25
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BillsPhoenix posted:Let me rephrase. yes it still has a purpose to its existence even if no one needs it, its exchange value is just zero unless someone really wants a second coat
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Mar 7, 2024 17:45
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BillsPhoenix posted:Let me rephrase. actually billsphoenix is getting at something interesting and relevant here. i'm going to re-quote marx from the last page, but more. this is from https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch03.htm Moreover, although our weaver’s labour may be a recognised branch of the social division of labour, yet that fact is by no means sufficient to guarantee the utility of his 20 yards of linen. If the community’s want of linen, and such a want has a limit like every other want, should already be saturated by the products of rival weavers, our friend’s product is superfluous, redundant, and consequently useless. Although people do not look a gift-horse in the mouth, our friend does not frequent the market for the purpose of making presents. But suppose his product turn out a real use-value, and thereby attracts money? The question arises, how much will it attract? No doubt the answer is already anticipated in the price of the article, in the exponent of the magnitude of its value. We leave out of consideration here any accidental miscalculation of value by our friend, a mistake that is soon rectified in the market. We suppose him to have spent on his product only that amount of labour-time that is on an average socially necessary. The price then, is merely the money-name of the quantity of social labour realised in his commodity. But without the leave, and behind the back, of our weaver, the old-fashioned mode of weaving undergoes a change. The labour-time that yesterday was without doubt socially necessary to the production of a yard of linen, ceases to be so to-day, a fact which the owner of the money is only too eager to prove from the prices quoted by our friend’s competitors. Unluckily for him, weavers are not few and far between. Lastly, suppose that every piece of linen in the market contains no more labour-time than is socially necessary. In spite of this, all these pieces taken as a whole, may have had superfluous labour-time spent upon them. If the market cannot stomach the whole quantity at the normal price of 2 shillings a yard, this proves that too great a portion of the total labour of the community has been expended in the form of weaving. The effect is the same as if each individual weaver had expended more labour-time upon his particular product than is socially necessary. Here we may say, with the German proverb: caught together, hung together. All the linen in the market counts but as one article of commerce, of which each piece is only an aliquot part. And as a matter of fact, the value also of each single yard is but the materialised form of the same definite and socially fixed quantity of homogeneous human labour. in layman's terms, there are pretty intuitive "supply and demand" interactions that still happen within the framework of use value vs. exchange value, and in specific things do happen to the de-facto use-value of a commidity (i think it's fine to say that a coat HAS a use-value rather than IS one, although you can say the latter and still be understood) if there is more of that commodity than anyone could possibly want or consume we want to hold two slightly-orthogonal things in our head here: -on one hand, marx talks about "use-value" just to refer to something's ability to satisfy a need. if there was one human on earth, then every single apple on earth does indeed serve as a use-value for that human, even though that one human will never need to eat every single apple on earth -on the other hand, commodities only have realizable exchange-value if someone is willing to buy them, and once you have sold every single person on earth all the apples they want, any future apples you harvest (that'll go bad before the customer base is finished eating the apples they've already got, also you have no more land to plant their seeds in, etc etc, you get it) are not going to sell, because they're as useless as a cow pie in this social context use-value can and does vary with time, place, and general historical context, and we can talk about it differently when considering whether anyone would want a coat ever in the abstract and considering whether anyone would want a coat in the middle of a siberian winter vs. in the tropics Ferrinus has issued a correction as of 20:23 on Mar 7, 2024 |
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Mar 7, 2024 20:20
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Building on the coat example. A coat has a use value in stopping rain. It fulfills this use value, where as a hammer does not. A coat can also be sold, and it has an exchange value. The use value contains the labor used to make the coat once completed. The labor itself is part of the use value. The exchange value is only the coats value in relation to the hammer. The only impact use value has is in existing. If rain stopped existing in the universe, negating the use value, the is no more exchange value. But as long as use value exists, there will be an exchange value.
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Mar 7, 2024 22:23
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BillsPhoenix posted:Building on the coat example. A coat has a use value in stopping rain. It fulfills this use value, where as a hammer does not. A coat can also be sold, and it has an exchange value. almost! i bolded the part that's wrong. exchange-value comes from labor; use-value comes purely from end-state physical properties for instance, some breathable air has a use-value (you can breathe it, thereby remaining alive) but no one had to do any labor to make it and you'd have a hard time trading it for a hammer or a pair of shoes until the climate apocalypse really gets into gear
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Mar 7, 2024 22:32
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BillsPhoenix posted:If rain stopped existing in the universe, negating the use value, the is no more exchange value. Men would rather imagine a physical universe without condensation than accept Marxism.
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Mar 7, 2024 22:32
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hey you try living somewhere with 85% humidity in the summer pal
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Mar 7, 2024 22:37
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Since marginal utility tends to pipe into a system where everything is approached quantitatively, it can be challenging, even confusing, to suddenly have to draw a distinction between a quantitative and qualitative dimension. But as one builds out one's palette of categories, those are the respective bins: use-value is a qualitative aspect, in contradistinction to the quantitative aspect in exchange value. (And the same act of labor that produces the coat similarly contains a qualitative dimension, as concrete coat-making rather than shoe-making, and a quantitative dimension, as abstract and value-positing.) And both use-value and exchange value are separate from "value" in the general sense of capital, which is an even more specific thing: a social relation distinct to the process of commodity production, in which quantity and quality are joined via the regular, repeatable production of a given good through a given sum of labor. To illustrate the interactions of the three categories, which all appear together in a commodity, here are some places where you might see one but not another:
But there's no case where you can find value absent use-value or exchange value; it's the sublation of the two, not totally unlike Hegel building out the concept of "measure" as emerging from the union and dialectical development of quality and quantity. Aeolius has issued a correction as of 22:43 on Mar 7, 2024 |
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Mar 7, 2024 22:38
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Okay, I grant you that, if gases could no longer transition into liquids, Marx's point about that particular example would be incorrect.
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Mar 7, 2024 22:40
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BillsPhoenix posted:Building on the coat example. A coat has a use value in stopping rain. It fulfills this use value, where as a hammer does not. A coat can also be sold, and it has an exchange value. plenty of things have use value without exchange value at all, like the air you are breathing right now and from the other end, the labor is not part of the use value. where would that exist in the physical object of the coat? is there a hidden ledger in some liminal realm, a little goblin accountant that makes it a little warmer if the person who made the coat was slower because they had a cold? Ferrinus posted:almost! i bolded the part that's wrong. exchange-value comes from labor; use-value comes purely from end-state physical properties beaten!
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Mar 7, 2024 22:44
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I'm just trying to understand if something can have a use value, then lose that use value as a result of an external change. I'll change up the question. Instead of making a coat, someone decides to make an "anti coat". This does not keep out the ran, it serves no purpose. No wants, no need, not even the creator wants one. Does this anti coat have a use value? (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Mar 7, 2024 22:47
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if you make something without use value its definitionally no longer a commodity, as a commodity is defined by its want/need fulfillment, i suspect. if it doesn't have a use-value it would fall in some other category. i'm not through with all of chapter 1 yet, but i'm guessing marx will move into defining money as a non-commodity that is used as the intermediary between two commodities. 100% a guess, sorry if it makes things more confusing.
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Mar 7, 2024 22:53
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BillsPhoenix posted:Instead of making a coat, someone decides to make an "anti coat". What the gently caress are we doing here people? You explain to me what the antithesis of a coat would be. e: I'm sorry. Other people are (rightly) being more patient. I guess I'm at a loss for your process of reasoning here. Why would it be easier to understand physics working differently, or this, a concept that does not (and cannot) exist, rather than follow along with what Marx is saying? "Exchange-value comes from labor; Use-value comes purely from end-state physical properties." That is much easier to understand than physical properties that do not exist like gases not condensing or an anti-coat. (A garment that doesn't cover the body? A full body covering that attracts solids and fluids from the environment to the skin through the membrane?) DJJIB-DJDCT has issued a correction as of 22:59 on Mar 7, 2024 |
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Mar 7, 2024 22:55
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BillsPhoenix posted:I'm just trying to understand if something can have a use value, then lose that use value as a result of an external change. it doesn't. the classic example used by people trying to deny the labor theory of value is like "what if i spend five hours of labor making a poo poo sandwich??? does that poo poo sandwich now sell for five dollars?" the answer is no, it doesn't, because no one wants it. you need to have a use-value in order to get to play the exchange value game
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Mar 7, 2024 22:58
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BillsPhoenix posted:I'll change up the question. Instead of making a coat, someone decides to make an "anti coat". This does not keep out the ran, it serves no purpose. No wants, no need, not even the creator wants one. why, pray tell, would labor be done for such a thing (negative marginal utility is one hell of a microeconomic fantasy btw)
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Mar 7, 2024 23:02
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BillsPhoenix posted:I'm just trying to understand if something can have a use value, then lose that use value as a result of an external change. Sure, this can happen. It might be easier to envision if the use-value is entirely social in character — a bit of iconography, let's say, with significance to a certain religious community — and social conditions change. If that religion dies out through attrition, conversion, natural disaster, colonial violence, etc., and suddenly you've just got a bunch of settlers around who see the art as junk, then what was once a use-value is no longer one, even if no one destroys it outright. Capital vol 1 ch 1 paragraph 3 posted:Every useful thing, as iron, paper, &c., may be looked at from the two points of view of quality and quantity. It is an assemblage of many properties, and may therefore be of use in various ways. To discover the various uses of things is the work of history.[3] So also is the establishment of socially-recognized standards of measure for the quantities of these useful objects. The diversity of these measures has its origin partly in the diverse nature of the objects to be measured, partly in convention. BillsPhoenix posted:I'll change up the question. Instead of making a coat, someone decides to make an "anti coat". This does not keep out the ran, it serves no purpose. No wants, no need, not even the creator wants one. Traditionally in this discourse, the hypothetical object of labor that has no use to anyone, even its creator, is usually nicknamed a "mud pie." Aeolius has issued a correction as of 23:07 on Mar 7, 2024 |
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Mar 7, 2024 23:03
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Alright I'm going to let go of insisting that commodities are a use value rather than have a use value because the only reason I was being pedantic about it was in the hope that it'd cause something to click and it's clearly not working.BillsPhoenix posted:Building on the coat example. A coat has a use value in stopping rain. It fulfills this use value, where as a hammer does not. A coat can also be sold, and it has an exchange value. Correct. quote:The use value contains the labor used to make the coat once completed. The labor itself is part of the use value. Wrong. The exchange value contains the labour used to make the coat. The use value is not determined by the labour. This is true as there exist natural resources which have a use value absent human labour. Similarly, if the process to produce the coat is improved such that it takes only half the labour to produce the same coat, the coat still has the exact same use value. It is the exchange value which changes, not the use value. quote:The exchange value is only the coats value in relation to the hammer. Essentially correct. But to expand and be precise, the exchange value exists only in relation to all other commodities, and the social circumstances of production. The social circumstances meaning how much labour is required to produce the commodity (specifically socially necessary labour time), and the mode of production and purpose for which it was produced. I'll get back to this in a second. quote:The only impact use value has is in existing. If rain stopped existing in the universe, negating the use value, the is no more exchange value. But as long as use value exists, there will be an exchange value. Wrong. Just because something has a use value doesn't mean it has an exchange value. For example a peasant providing a tithe of the produce of the lands they work to their lord in a feudal society for consumption by that lord, their family or their men-at-arms or whatever. At no point has that produce held an exchange value. This is because the mode of production here was feudal, rather than capitalist, and that system consists of different social circumstances. Similarly, if you were to go prepare a meal for yourself and then eat it, that meal never held an exchange value. The ingredients presumably did, as you likely acquired them in a shop of some sort, but when you transformed those ingredients to the commodity of a meal through your labour that happened outside the capitalist mode of production. You weren't expending your labour to produce a meal as a commodity with the aim to make money, but you were expending your labour to make a meal to feed yourself (and thus not as a commodity). So in conclusion: 1) use value can exist independent of human labour, though granted only for a select few things in nature 2) useful things become commodities under the capitalist mode of production 3) use values of different commodities can not be directly compared 4) commodities have an exchange-value 5) the exchange value of commodities consists of human labour, specifically the socially necessary labour time to produce the commodity 6) the exchange value of different commodities can be compared directly, and that is one of the purposes of exchange value BillsPhoenix posted:I'm just trying to understand if something can have a use value, then lose that use value as a result of an external change. Ofcourse. For example, if humanity goes extinct then everything loses its use value. quote:I'll change up the question. Instead of making a coat, someone decides to make an "anti coat". This does not keep out the ran, it serves no purpose. No wants, no need, not even the creator wants one. This is just mud pies. Let me quote Marx Capital Volume 1 chapter 1 literally the third sentence: "A commodity is, in the first place, an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another." So I think you ought to be able to answer your own question. Orange Devil has issued a correction as of 23:12 on Mar 7, 2024 |
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Mar 7, 2024 23:04
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dead gay comedy forums posted:why, pray tell, would labor be done for such a thing This is why I feel like I'm going crazy reading this discussion
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Mar 7, 2024 23:04
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DJJIB-DJDCT posted:This is why I feel like I'm going crazy reading this discussion now that’s a good reason to work at it, because it is good ideological training for people like you haha when we started pol econ II (which is just Marx), use-value and exchange-value was still a trip to a bunch of students , even though we had theory of value in pol econ I. Recognizing a new category of value that is intrinsic and independent of money is something that doesn’t occur to a lot of people as such
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Mar 7, 2024 23:12
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dead gay comedy forums posted:now that’s a good reason to work at it, because it is good ideological training for people like you haha No I don't feel like I'm going crazy from Marx, I feel like I'm going crazy from the anti-coat. It's that Marx is so much easier to understand than conceiving of an antithetical garment that's perplexing me. You would think for someone with Capital in front of them, it's easier to follow along than ... whatever is going on here. idk Like I said other people are being patient and kind, so maybe I'm just not following the particular form of reasoning being employed. DJJIB-DJDCT has issued a correction as of 23:16 on Mar 7, 2024 |
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Mar 7, 2024 23:13
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use value is subjective and is, as others have said, qualitative and not quantitative and incommensurable between different needs trying to put a number on gains or losses in use value is like, let's say you compare a blue square and a red square. you can say the red square is less blue than the blue square, it's not an insensible statement, but it is kind of a categorical error.
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Mar 7, 2024 23:17
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DJJIB-DJDCT posted:No I don't feel like I'm going crazy from Marx, I feel like I'm going crazy from the anti-coat. it's because you've been trained that things without monetary cost have value, and you correctly identify that thinking that exchange cost being equivalent to value is insane because it is, it's how you make a machine that grinds up people and the world they live in, by not valuing either
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Mar 7, 2024 23:22
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DJJIB-DJDCT posted:No I don't feel like I'm going crazy from Marx, I feel like I'm going crazy from the anti-coat. I think Bills is being very heavily tripped up by the quantitative vs qualitative distinction, which ok that can happen but also on top of that sees words like "utility" and brings with him a massive amount of baggage from his western econ training about what this ought to mean and imply and blablabla rather than just going in blank slate and letting Marx define his terms and then evaluating what Marx is saying on those terms. It's one of the ways in which he was trained wrong, as a joke. And the breakthrough will be when he finally realizes that isn't air he's breathing and just lets go of all his preconceived notions and grapples with the text as actually written. Like for real for real read up on the prisoners dilemma and specifically how when econ departments run experiments on their own econ students they all tend to be cutthroat as gently caress going for the obvious optimum of mutual betrayal (and this becomes only more prevalent the more training in western econ the students have already received), but then when a bunch of profs ran the same experiment on their secretaries suddenly they were cooperating. And that kinda undermines a hell of a lot of "proven" research they did about human rationality and nature and blablabla dumb justifications for capitalism and western econ understandings of the world. There's a reason I tell people not to study western econ and it's not that I disagree with it, it's that it will literally make you less able to understand the world correctly and be a decent human being to your fellow human beings. Orange Devil has issued a correction as of 23:26 on Mar 7, 2024 |
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Mar 7, 2024 23:23
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Washing your brain ftw
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Mar 7, 2024 23:27
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DJJIB-DJDCT posted:No I don't feel like I'm going crazy from Marx, I feel like I'm going crazy from the anti-coat. Officer, think of it like this: the enemy uses sophisms, hypotheticals grounded on fictitious worlds and every manner of perfidious casuistry to perform ideological annihilation of good sense; dialectical and historical materialism is the devastating counterbattery fire
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Mar 7, 2024 23:27
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I've found this discussion valuable, even with the anticoats. People you talk to about these things are sometimes going to land on similarly silly-sounding counterarguments or hypotheticals, so it's useful to know that no matter how exotic the example, it's still just mud pies
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Mar 7, 2024 23:27
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I appreciate the insights. It makes more sense if this conception of monetary value is the firmament, because then yeah, imagining otherwise would be experience as imagining a world without rain or coats that aren’t. If western capitalist economics feels as real as gravity, you can’t imagine a world without it, right? Parenthetically, this is why history written by economists isn’t just bad it’s non sensical, filled with rational economic actors who enter feudal bonds for maximum self interest, even though actual cash in the economy was pretty much nil, and so on.
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Mar 7, 2024 23:48
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BillsPhoenix posted:I'm just trying to understand if something can have a use value, then lose that use value as a result of an external change. it’s called fashion, sweaty… you’re being too reductive in what use value is, trying to pin down the essence of a coat or whatever. it’s just something people want (to keep the rain out) or need (to be cool). the quantization you’re looking for comes from the labor needed to produce the coat
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Mar 7, 2024 23:50
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dead gay comedy forums posted:Officer, think of it like this: the enemy uses sophisms, hypotheticals grounded on fictitious worlds and every manner of perfidious casuistry to perform ideological annihilation of good sense; dialectical and historical materialism is the devastating counterbattery fire otoh, every thing we know about, say, physics we know about an abstraction of world we can't see or touch. yet our just so stories about things have told us enough about the way things actually are that they allowed us to build computers to shitpost on and rockets to spread capitalism to the stars with. in the humanities too, "philosophical zombie" thought experiments aren't meant to get you to seriously consider whether everyone around you is an alien or a robot, they're meant to prod you into wondering about what consciousness is, how you can be so drat sure you have it and most importantly how it manifest and interacts with a physical world. that's not sophistry, it's the opposite, it's meant to dispel illegitimate certainty, not reinforce it. prisoners dilemma may be a toy example, but if it models the world, it demonstrates that socialism is the best way to order it. this is an econ thread, electrons may be a fiction, but they're way more real than nasdaq numbers. maybe be wary that you don't exclude imagination outright and end up unknowingly replacing good sense and material analysis with dogma
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Mar 8, 2024 00:22
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Wow look at all you loving chumps getting baited by a guy who came up with the concept of an anti-coat. All y'all need Stalin.
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Mar 8, 2024 01:21
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