Maybe I'm mistaken but I thought that "socially necessary labor" refereed to the average amount of time it takes a worker to create a commodity, not whether it meets a human need.
So what would Marx call something which does not really meet a definite human need, but which is nonetheless valued highly within society, i.e. a diamond. Would he call that an example of capitalism's failure to value objects correctly?
Value doesn't just have to relate to necessities, or even objects with practical utility. It can also apply to objects that have social connotations.
You can't eat a diamond, but in your society a diamond is a form of social standing; and because there exists the drive to attain a higher standing in society an individual is driven to vollect and display a greater amount of objects with a high social value.
In general, the labor theory of value states that the more labor it takes to make something, the more its exchange-value goes up.
There's not much use value from a diamond, but they're hard to get. If you could just pick them up off the ground like pebbles, even if they were about as rare, they'd be largely worthless.
Also, some post modernists intending to refute Marx talked about notions of social capital, which exactly are a good expansion of the original theory. A diamond doesn't have good use-value, but it has social use-value. It demonstrates class and status, among other things. Wearing one is a kind of decadent display, as if to say you have so much money, you can wear someone else's wages on your body like a trifle.
Ah - I'm sure that these terms aren't actually encoded in theory, just things I came up with to understand what little theory I have read better - so destructive labor in my mind is to take something that has value and render it with less value - ie take a well done piece of art and splash color on it, or take a car and remove its tires - both of which could be considered labor, but ultimately make the original object worth less than it was before (wrt to art it could actually make it worth more, but that's only if people somehow feel like the lost worth has any artistic value, which would rarely ever be the case)
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Maybe I'm mistaken but I thought that "socially necessary labor" refereed to the average amount of time it takes a worker to create a commodity, not whether it meets a human need.
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So what would Marx call something which does not really meet a definite human need, but which is nonetheless valued highly within society, i.e. a diamond. Would he call that an example of capitalism's failure to value objects correctly?
Value doesn't just have to relate to necessities, or even objects with practical utility. It can also apply to objects that have social connotations.
You can't eat a diamond, but in your society a diamond is a form of social standing; and because there exists the drive to attain a higher standing in society an individual is driven to vollect and display a greater amount of objects with a high social value.
In general, the labor theory of value states that the more labor it takes to make something, the more its exchange-value goes up.
There's not much use value from a diamond, but they're hard to get. If you could just pick them up off the ground like pebbles, even if they were about as rare, they'd be largely worthless.
Also, some post modernists intending to refute Marx talked about notions of social capital, which exactly are a good expansion of the original theory. A diamond doesn't have good use-value, but it has social use-value. It demonstrates class and status, among other things. Wearing one is a kind of decadent display, as if to say you have so much money, you can wear someone else's wages on your body like a trifle.
Ah - I'm sure that these terms aren't actually encoded in theory, just things I came up with to understand what little theory I have read better - so destructive labor in my mind is to take something that has value and render it with less value - ie take a well done piece of art and splash color on it, or take a car and remove its tires - both of which could be considered labor, but ultimately make the original object worth less than it was before (wrt to art it could actually make it worth more, but that's only if people somehow feel like the lost worth has any artistic value, which would rarely ever be the case)
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