The first question I have is a little more obvious, but I would like to have more in-depth explanations/resources for the second. These questions are based on an argument I had.
- Do advertisers give the products they advertise value?
My reasoning was that no, they do not give products more value. Useful labor gives value, whereas advertisements are both (a.) basically useless and (b.) not related to the production of the commodity. The person I was arguing with talked about how diamonds are useless, and they were artificially given demand by both ‘limited’ supply and vigorous advertisement campaigns. I replied that price gauging/differentiating exchange values does not mean an increase in use value/actual value, and the consumers were purely getting ripped off. The other person then said that advertisements, in fact, contributed to the inherent value of a product (somehow?) by making the consumer enjoy the commodity more. To me, even if advertisers were to produce use value, it would be in advertisements, not the commodities themselves.
- If (a.) an artist’s work is useful in creating art, (b.) art in society has value, and (c.) the value of art is ‘subjective’, do artists even produce use-value, or is art even subjective?
So imagine: all socially necessary labor time (bag of services and products consumed by population) is spent during production, done deal, we spent say 5 trillion or 50 million working years.
Then by some mysterious process this bag of products and services is getting redistributed so much so, that bill gates can afford to buy food for 5 million people for a year. That mysterious process is surplus value redistribution: porkies redistribute products and services in such a way as to get the most renumeration (in dollars).
Advertisers serve two functions: creating new social necessity (either real or imaginary) “creating new markets’” (eg iphone), or dividing shares in already established markets (stealing/holding share of the market) (eg coca cola). First function can be maybe described as having some utility on level of society, but that depends on social necessity creation (making woken smoke doesn’t seem very helpful), second function is purely redistribution of surplus value (protection money) to advertising agencies to protect against other capital.
Art has value for society, again, as a whole. Advertising art seems largely forgettable
Imagine in simplified form, we have a village with 100 working-people, and three capitalists (or lords for that case), 2 of them own the land and one owns harvester. To produce harvester you need 10 men, to farm land you need 20 men (let’s call one unit of eating ton, so 100 ton for village) to produce 200 tons of corn.
harvester porky says “I need 30 ton to feed my workers and for my profits, pay me this for harvester, or get fucked”. They pay him, and hire both workers to produce 200 tons of corn in total. So they’ve 170 tons left after paying harvester bougie.
Now they start to redistribute 170 tons. they pay their 20 workers 20 tons of corn, and hire the rest the village in socially unnecessary work, cause they don’t want to get pitchforked over (say praetorian guard and jewelry production). They still are left with 70 tons of corn (35 tons each), which they have to sell outside.
One of the porkies comes with the bright idea that if they owned all of the market they would have 70 tons of corn to sell solo, and could get hire second porky’s jeweler as well.
They hire a guy to say that second porky corn is poo, and their corn is best, and start to attract more labor (cause their ton of corn is now worth 1.2, and second porkies - 0.8). Second porky has to give either more corn to his laborers (cause it’s perceived value is lower), thus reducing his surplus or hire his own guy to do the reverse.
But the end total state is exact same even if first porky won their ad war - 100 laborers get 100 tons, he just gets 70 tons solely for himself.
To address point number 1, the value that an item or commodity has is the product of its embodied labor, that is, the amount of work that has gone into creating it.
This, however, is separate from it's price on the market. They are related, and objects will usually sell for their valued price, on average, but that price also contains unpaid labor in the form of profit to the company.
What Marx points out is that this income from sales is separate from the costs that have gone into creating it. Creation was paid through prior income/capital, and this new revenue from sales will pay for the next round of production. This it is not guaranteed that the product produced will be sold, nor even sold for its value (if eg, the use value is low also).
So, advertising doesn't give value to the production of a commodity, but can open new channels to ensure that those products are sold and the capitalist can recoup money and profit. I guess you could consider that labor of producing advertising as part of the labor used to create the product.
So, maybe it does imbue the product with additional labor value.
