Scarcity & Labour Value

[Comrade #138672]

I was watching a television program about auctions. Most of the time they're trying to find some rare item that they can sell for some profit. I was wondering whether you could still view this profit as part of the labour power of some worker, when for example the item is hundreds of years old. If not, then would this kind of profit be justified for the capitalist?

[ckaihatsu]

I was watching a television program about auctions. Most of the time they're trying to find some rare item that they can sell for some profit. I was wondering whether you could still view this profit as part of the labour power of some worker, when for example the item is hundreds of years old. If not, then would this kind of profit be justified for the capitalist?


This trend, interestingly, has more of a *psychological* dynamic to it than an economic one -- in line with much of content programming being about appealing to the areas in which one's own life in reality comes up short (fantasy), the auctions-of-forgotten-and-now-discovered-valuable-items kind of show is essentially a wish-fulfillment for those who have been encouraged to follow the world of cultural artifacts their entire lives.

There's also an element of nostalgia as well, in a period of more-recent decades in which a more-generic mass consumerism has been the norm due to the more-available consumer products of globalized mass industrial production.

But mostly, I think, it's the prospect of getting something for nothing -- the lottery-winning event that you didn't even need to buy a lottery ticket for, since it was just benignly packed away in the attic waiting to be found for your benefit. (Which raises a socioeconomic factor of those who have even *had* home ownership over successive generations, but that's beyond the scope of what I can address.)

[Blake's Baby]

When Marx talks about labour producing value, he does so to determine what it is that actually produces value. He also carefully says that the labour embodied in something is in the end the thing that determines its value, but that it isn't the onle thing.

Consider:
1 - an artifact that has been made by people and placed safely in storage for 400 years (such as a rare plate on an antiques programme, which turns out to be worth £1,000);
2 - an artifact that has been made by people which was not stored but used until it broke and was discarded (some rubbish at the bottom of an old dump, possibly even a broken plate similar to the one above);
3 - an object made by people of which 20 million identical copies survive (such as a modern plate, worth £3);
4 - an object that was not made by people but was placed safely in storage for 400 years (eg, a tree-branch left in a shed).

1 & 3, the two plates that aren't broken, can both be used as plates. The rubbish is no use to anyone except an historian of platemaking, and even then it's not of use as an object in its own right but as a source of information about the history of plates. The tree branch might be of use, but not enough to justify the 400 years of storage. One doesn't need to keep a bit of wood in a shed for 400 years, wood isn't so hard to come by.

But the question then would be, why is the 400 year old plate more valuable than the modern plate? Don't they have (more or less) the same amount of labour in them? Of course the answer is yes. And if we look on them just as plates, we can see that there is one old plate costing £1,000 and 20 million modern plates costing £3 each. The price of the old plate is several orders of magnitude different to the modern plates. So something else in this case must be affecting price.

Marx talks about prices fluctuating around the value (derived from labour) in a situation where neither the buyer nor the seller is able to monopolise the market. In the case of modern plates, there are lots of people who need plates to eat their breakfast off, and a lot of manufacturers producing plates. So that's fairly easy, the price of plates doesn't change much, it fluctuates around the value of a plate (ie the cost of its labour). Some are £3, some fancy ones are £5. So far so good.

In the case of a 400-year-old plate, well, there are only a few hundred left in the world. No new producers means that there's a finite limit to production. We have after all 88 more years to make 21st century plates, more factories can open up, there are potentially billions more plates to be made this century, but there will never be more 17th century plates than currently exist (we may find an unknown stash somewhere but that only increases the known examples, we can never increase the total).

So in this case the seller is able to monpolise the situation - few commodities (in this case 17th century plates) means that the sellers of those commodities can drive up prices. No-one else can undercut them by producing more 17th century plates; the number of 17th plates will never be able to fulfill the effective demand for them. A large number of potential consumers and a small number of commodities for the demand means a situation where sellers can name their own price. That's the situation - and as I say, one that Marx specifically refers to.

In the end the question about the value of the plate and whether it's still the labour inherent in it that determines the value; if it wasn't a plate but was instead some clay in the ground (that has been there 400 years and could be made into a plate) then it's obvious that if no labour had gone into it, it wouldn't be worth £1,000. So it's still the fact that it's been worked (shaped and fired, then stored safely) - ie laboured over - that means it's a commodity not just a resource (like the examples of the wood an the clay). Profit depends in the end on labour, simple as.

[ckaihatsu]

So in this case the seller is able to monpolise the situation - few commodities (in this case 17th century plates) means that the sellers of those commodities can drive up prices. No-one else can undercut them by producing more 17th century plates; the number of 17th plates will never be able to fulfill the effective demand for them. A large number of potential consumers and a small number of commodities for the demand means a situation where sellers can name their own price. That's the situation - and as I say, one that Marx specifically refers to.


I'll point out -- and this is the reason I didn't address the question directly -- that in the case of rare items like these, the initial exploitation of labor had already been done long ago, and what we're now dealing with is a *secondary market* of pretty-much pure speculation.

[Prof. Oblivion]

Political economy is based on persistent production under normal conditions. Any exceptions to this rule aren't really applicable because it is a systems-approach, not one that can be applied on an individual commodity basis.

[ckaihatsu]

F.y.i., here's a treatment of a political economy that takes material availabilities into account.

It's worth noting, as shown in the illustration at the link, that the market system actually isn't that bad a method if the items that need to be distributed are necessarily scarce, in low-demand, and all other factors can be valued neutrally -- obviously that only applies to very specific conditions that are not the norm, like a secondary commodity market for rare collectibles.


Multi-Tiered System of Productive and Consumptive Zones for a Post-Capitalist Political Economy

http://tinyurl.com/mtspczpcpe
http://postimage.org/image/ccfl07uy5/