How Does Marx's Law of Value Explain $2,000 Purses?

[cogar66]

www . polyvore.com/cgi/thing?id=28375074

I'm just curious as to how Marx's Law of Value explains this. I'm still fairly new to Marx, and I'd love to learn more. Thanks ahead of time. :)

[Ocean Seal]

www . polyvore.com/cgi/thing?id=28375074

I'm just curious as to how Marx's Law of Value explains this. I'm still fairly new to Marx, and I'd love to learn more. Thanks ahead of time. :)
Good to hear that you want to learn more. Anyway I'm not the comrade with the greatest in depth analysis of Marxist theory, but I'll give it a shot.

The first thing is that price is not the same thing as value. So even if something costs more it doesn't mean that its value is its price. But for what its worth, a greater amount of labor went into making those purses than say $40 knockoffs. The people that they hire to make these purses are probably highly specialized and take a rather long time to make the purses in addition to coming up with the artistic design for them. To say that the difference in labor is what causes the difference in price might not totally be true though. But certainly the people value the designer handbags more because more labor went into them.

[bezdomni]

People are willing to pay for status symbols?

Remember that the price and exchange value of a commodity are not identical.

General Relation of Value, Price and Profit (Economic Manuscripts) (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1865/value-price-profit/ch03.htm#c12)


The price of a pound of yarn would, in the one instance, be only sixpence, although wages were relatively high and the rate of profit low; it would be three shillings in the other instance, although wages were low and the rate of profit high. This would be so because the price of the pound of yarn is regulated by the total amount of labour worked up in it, and not by the proportional division of that total amount into paid and unpaid labour. The fact I have mentioned before that high-price labour may produce cheap, and low-priced labour may produce dear commodities, loses, therefore, its paradoxical appearance. It is only the expression of the general law that the value of a commodity is regulated by the quantity of labour worked up in it, and the the quantity of labour worked up in it depends altogether upon the productive powers of labour employed, and will therefore, vary with every variation in the productivity of labour.

[cogar66]

Thanks for the responses! I already knew that Prices are a representation of Value, and not the same thing, and that supply/demand among other things change the price. I don't know why this didn't occur to me when I thought about this, my brain must be off today. Thanks again! :thumbup1:

[Thirsty Crow]

People are willing to pay for status symbols?

I don't think that is a good explanation. Or, in other words, it is true that some people are more than willing to pay ludicruous amounts of money for a commodity that does differe significantly from a similar commodity, but then three questions should be posed:

1) how do the economic processes constitute such consumers with great purchasing power (income)

2) is there a functional role, within the capitalist global system, played by those people, and other "agents" in this process (consumer-producer-bank chain for instance) and

3) what specific mechanism of value addition is here at play

The third question can also be related to the issue of labour: designer commodities, in my opinion, employ a whole lot more of labour, indirectly in marketing for instance and related services, which means more labour is expended in the general process of value addition.

Another aspect of this marketing/media side of the process could be described as the image that is first picked up by consumers (and which subsequently masks and mystifies the factors which were mentioned above). It is correctly noted that such commodities are not mere usable commodities, but rather status symbols which also function in a kind of a psychological manner, namely, they construct an elaborate image of subjectivity which is consumed by the actual act of buying and using it in social situations.