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quote:It also makes the point that the first three chapters of the book are the toughest and where most people give up, so if we can make it through those we should have smooth sailing ahead. This is me all three times I attempted to read volume 1. I will at minimal  in this thread and try to push past these three chapters. For anyone interested in a Marx biography, Love and Capital is a fantastic biography of him and his family. It details the real sacrifices Marx and his family made to help him write these volumes. Below is a review. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/25/books/review/love-and-capital-by-mary-gabriel-book-review.html
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Apr 11, 2017 04:47
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 05:42 |
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I'm reading chapter one again and already a great footnote:quote:In bourgeois society the legal fiction prevails that each person, as a buyer, has an encyclopedic knowledge of commodities. I think it goes beyond legal in modern day society, it is almost a moral fiction, like people should know where their eggs or chicken are sourced blah blah blah
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Apr 11, 2017 05:01
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Ruzihm posted:Can someone explain how can you (for instance) reduce the work of a skilled watchmaker to a greater quantity of labor of an unskilled watchmaker who can't even make a proper watch? Is it saying that you can equate skilled watchmaking with enough unskilled watchmaking utilizing trial an error? I think I get what Marx is saying, but something more concrete would be great. You are misunderstanding value here. Someone who can't make a watch at all or is failing to making a watch is producing no value. They wouldn't be making a watch. 'Skill' in this instance is related to the production. value. More skill=more value produced. While at a micro level, a skilled watchmaker can generate more value than than a unskilled one, at a macro level the skill produced by all watchmakers is an average. It leads into a contradiction of labor. If I am producing more value than my colleague, it is likely that I am having more value taken from me. Even if my increased in production of value makes me get paid better, it is only because the owners are making a larger profit off of my labor. At least, I think that is what is going on  Edit: It might be simpler to say skill is in relation to average value produced. Higher than average=high skilled, lower than average=low killed. Mean Baby has issued a correction as of 20:19 on Apr 19, 2017 |
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Apr 19, 2017 20:14
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Peel posted:Dollar bills are one thing in that they have a value that is wildly distinct from the exchange value, though granted the text itself says that exchange value and value don't always match. I would actually go farther and suggest that value, use-value, and exchange value are entirely different forms of value. They don't match. A key point in the first few chapters is showing that the exchange values does represent the value of a commodity (the socially necessary labor necessary to produce) or the use-value (how useful it). It congeals the latter two forms of value and fetishes the exchange value of the commodity. Let's use the iPhone and Juicero as example commodities. Value: I think it is safe to say the socially necessary labor time to produce a iPhone and Juicero is different. We can say it costs 20 hours for an iPhone and 10 for a Juicero. In other words, 1 iPhone=2 Juicero. It could also be 2 iPhone=1 Juicero. Use-value: iPhone is a computer in your pocket. Juicero is a thing which squeezes bags of poo poo slower than you could with your hand. Exchange Value: iPhone=$700, Juicero=$700 As Marx points out, the exchange value of a commodity 'congeals' it actual value (socially necessary labor) and often has no relationship to it's use-value. Something costs more only means it costs more, not that it is more useful or has more value. The iPhone/Juicero example is how two things can have different value and cost the same amount. Some commodities, like the iPhone and Juicero, are sold way above their value. Other commodities, like most retail items, are barely above their value, and still others, like video game consoles, are actually sold at a lower cost than the their value. Commodity fetishism is a key reason for this process. Branding is all about increasing the exchange value of products without fundamentally altering it's value. While marketing is certainly reflected in the value of a commodity (it is apart of the socially necessary labor time), the socially necessary labor time necessary to build a brand is less than upgrading a processor. This is why company's invest so much in marketing. Fetishism works the other way as well. When we buy food at the supermarket, we usually discuss them in terms of their exchange value. This apple is expensive, I got a good deal on Doritos, the Mountain Dew was on sale. We rarely think about the socially necessary labor time, the amazing process which got it to the supermarket, often with extremely cheap exploited labor, or how useful this commodity is to our body, "these Doritos will make me sick". Our relationship to food changes. We now seeing a process where food is taking on the inverse fetishization, where people believe it can heal cancer. While dollars don't have any use-value or cost very little labor time to produce, there are plenty of other examples of this phenomenon. Our entire financial system is selling commodities like stocks, insurance, etc. where exchange value is generated off of other exchange value mechanisms being trivial to produce and having no actual use.
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Apr 20, 2017 20:03
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Electric Owl posted:Sure, but since NNick says that you can produce 2 Juicero in the time it'd take to produce 1 iPhone then wouldn't a true price that reflected the exchange value be $350 for the Juicero and $700 for the iPhone? Not $700 equally? I think this point has been made but the 'exchange value' is not value in-itself. Exchange-value is the value a product has in exchange not how useful it is (use-value) or how valuable it is (how much labor time it takes to produce). Society denotes the exchange value through the price of a product through a currency. There really isn't a 'true price' in relation to value of any commodity. My understanding is the exchange value has no relationship to the use-value or value.
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May 3, 2017 03:26
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 05:42 |
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Peel posted:Harvey discusses that & similar statements starting around 0:26:40. Apparently there's a debate between the position that he was just being antisemitic like most of his contemporaries or being ironic & suggesting anti-semitic sentiment is properly directed at capitalists. I think the suggested exoneration is a bit tenuous but I don't know the relevant texts and context in detail. I strongly recommend everyone read On the Jewish Question, it is one of Marx's first works and it is short. It explores the tension between political emancipation of the state from religion and allowing for Jews to practice their religion freely. The west has created a free state, but the people are enslaved by religion and capital. It ends on a controversial and anti-Semitic statement (below). He has no nice words for Christianity either. He is the man who said "Religion is the opiate of the masses'", after all. quote:Since in civil society the real nature of the Jew has been universally realized and secularized, civil society could not convince the Jew of the unreality of his religious nature, which is indeed only the ideal aspect of practical need. Consequently, not only in the Pentateuch and the Talmud, but in present-day society we find the nature of the modern Jew, and not as an abstract nature but as one that is in the highest degree empirical, not merely as a narrowness of the Jew, but as the Jewish narrowness of society. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question/
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May 3, 2017 03:45
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