Come get your slop

  • DragonNest_Aidit [they/them,use name]
    ·
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    Even most of it's "rebuttal" doesn't actually disprove the core of the theory, but rather the superficial details like what happens in the point of sale or in the free market. Things are only valuable if you put work into it. If something is worthless to you but worth something to other, it still does not change the fact that to acquire that thing you have to put work into making the product come into fruition in the first place.

    Like this slightly more thought out variant of the mudpie argument I've heard, this time with berry pie. Suppose a village have a species of berries that everyone is allergic to, meaning that any labor put into them; like cooking them into pies; would be socially useless and thus making it worthless, yet if there's a neighboring village that's not allergic to the berry and is willing to buy berry pies, that means value is subjective! ...except that you know, the allergic villagers have to put work into gathering the berries, baking them into pies, and transporting them to the neighboring village. If the allergic villagers refuse to work with the berries, then berries will never generate any value in a million year no matter how theoretically valuable, unless the berry lovers go the berries and produce pies themselves, which to them is a socially necessary labor.

    "Supreme brick!" the clay have to be mined from the ground, baked into bricks with the branding, packaged, and delivered. "Cryptocurrency!" you have to produce computers that can produce the cryptocurrency whose system must be programmed by the labor of programmers. "Gamer girl bath water!" the gamer girl still have to do the labor of bathing, packaging, marketing, and delivering the goods. The moment things no longer require labor to generate value is the moment humanity have either went extinct or achieved godhood.

    • star_wraith [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Right even Marx himself talks about how price will often deviate from value in the first chapters of Capital vol. 1. He didn't go into great detail about the LTV because at the time, pretty much everyone (including the bourgeois political economists) took the LTV for granted.

      • jackal [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        And pretty much as a rule, the prices are almost never equal to the value. But Marx did hold three aggregate equalities, namely that total values equal total prices, total surplus value equals total profit, and total price rate of profit equals total value rate of profit.

    • AcidSmiley [she/her]
      ·
      2 years ago

      “Gamer girl bath water!” the gamer girl still have to do the labor of bathing, packaging, marketing, and delivering the goods.

      hexbear try not to sabotage my business ideas challenge