Is Love a Commodity?

[Faux Real]

Just raising the question. However you define "love", I feel that it requires some sort of "labor" to "produce"--thoughts, emotions, feelings, in turn can be channeled into doing something to create that "love". After this feeling of "love" is produced the need for it to be exchanged either reciprocally for another's "love"; or whatever the exchange value may be...for instance gold diggers, "artificial" attractiveness, etc.

Commodity in the Marxist sense of the word by the way.

Thoughts?

[Everyday Anarchy]

You are not exchanging your feelings. They are expressed.

[Faux Real]

Originally posted by Everyday [email protected] 10, 2007 03:25 pm
You are not exchanging your feelings. They are expressed.
In my thesis that expression is the production of love.

[Marsella]

By the same analogy anger or hate would be a commodity.

And if you really want to get Marxist and boring:


A commodity is, in the first place, an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another. The nature of such wants, whether, for instance, they spring from the stomach or from fancy, makes no difference. Neither are we here concerned to know how the object satisfies these wants, whether directly as means of subsistence, or indirectly as means of production.

Every useful thing, as iron, paper, &c., may be looked at from the two points of view of quality and quantity. It is an assemblage of many properties, and may therefore be of use in various ways. To discover the various uses of things is the work of history. So also is the establishment of socially-recognized standards of measure for the quantities of these useful objects. The diversity of these measures has its origin partly in the diverse nature of the objects to be measured, partly in convention.

The utility of a thing makes it a use value. But this utility is not a thing of air. Being limited by the physical properties of the commodity, it has no existence apart from that commodity. A commodity, such as iron, corn, or a diamond, is therefore, so far as it is a material thing, a use value, something useful. This property of a commodity is independent of the amount of labour required to appropriate its useful qualities. When treating of use value, we always assume to be dealing with definite quantities, such as dozens of watches, yards of linen, or tons of iron. The use values of commodities furnish the material for a special study, that of the commercial knowledge of commodities. Use values become a reality only by use or consumption: they also constitute the substance of all wealth, whatever may be the social form of that wealth. In the form of society we are about to consider, they are, in addition, the material depositories of exchange value. Capital, Chapter 1, Section 1 (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm#S1)

So, emotions cannot be a commodity, not being physically tangible; just as cultural property cannot be a commodity too.

And anyway, love just seems a mystical word for an extreme, perhaps irrational, attachment to something.

But what would I know, I've never been in love - or at least I haven't fulfilled the romantic definition of it. :(

[Faux Real]

Yeah I was afraid of the word "material". -_-

I don't know what made me come up with this analogy... but anyways I guess that sums it up.

Thanks for the input guys!

[LSD]

Physical love is a process, emotional love is an experience. The former can be rendered as a commodity, the latter cannot.

[Marsella]

Originally posted by [email protected] 11, 2007 11:27 am
Physical love is a process, emotional love is an experience. The former can be rendered as a commodity, the latter cannot.
That's interesting but I'm not sure what you're getting at.

Physical love (meaning sex?) can be a commodity?

Emotional love (as what we were talking about) cannot be?

How can physical love be rendered a commodity since no object is created?

Professions like lawyers create no commodities, same goes for sex workers.

How could we objectively measure this commodity?

[TC]

Its very in vogue in some lefty circles to say that sex or even love is a 'commodity' or that there is a commodification of sex, love, beauty, or whatever...

...but none of those things can fit the definition of commodity used in Marxian economics.

For something to be a commodity following the Marxian labour theory of value it needs to be reproducible by a particular amount of labour. Things that aren't reproducible such as unique works of art do not follow these economic rules. If you could objectify love as something that could be transfered from one to another, it would be in the later category.

[PigmerikanMao]

Originally posted by [email protected] 11, 2007 02:07 am
How could we objectively measure this commodity?
By how good it was. :mellow:

[Schrödinger's Cat]

Originally posted by PigmerikanMao+November 11, 2007 04:54 am--> (PigmerikanMao @ November 11, 2007 04:54 am)
[email protected] 11, 2007 02:07 am
How could we objectively measure this commodity?
By how good it was. :mellow: [/b]
:lol: Nice.

[JazzRemington]

The expression of love can be embodied in the use-value of a commodity. For instance: if I give my love some flowers, the use-value of the flowers (at least to me) would be that I can express my love with them.

[MarxSchmarx]

Yeah I was afraid of the word "material"


Something could be a commodity and still be not quite material, e.g. services.



For something to be a commodity following the Marxian labour theory of value it needs to be reproducible by a particular amount of labour... If you could objectify love as something that could be transfered from one to another, it would be in the later category.

We seem to be able to reproduce "love" for, say, a pet when the ownership of the pet is transfered from one person to the next.

Plus it seems the promise of genuine love is what places like "mail-order brides" effectively offer. Whether one can in fact purchase love, this doesn't stop others from effectively selling affection.

Although it's right that using these definitions, anger and whatnot can be commodities too. But it seems the potential to be commodities is distinct from being commodities.

[Luís Henrique]

Originally posted by [email protected] 12, 2007 08:35 am
Something could be a commodity and still be not quite material, e.g. services.
Services are material.

Luís Henrique

[Luís Henrique]

Originally posted by [email protected] 10, 2007 10:18 pm
Just raising the question. However you define "love", I feel that it requires some sort of "labor" to "produce"--thoughts, emotions, feelings, in turn can be channeled into doing something to create that "love".
Love cannot be a commodity, although I am sure that capitalists would very much like the opposite to be true.

Love cannot be "produced". A product is something that exists in the mind of its producer, before it is materialised by labour. Someone imagines a brick, a doll, a cheeseburger, a painting, a gun - and then this same someone, or someone else, performs the necessary operations to create those use values. Love happens spontaneously; you cannot decide "today I am going to love Mary" and then produce love for Mary as a result of your decision.


After this feeling of "love" is produced the need for it to be exchanged either reciprocally for another's "love"; or whatever the exchange value may be...for instance gold diggers, "artificial" attractiveness, etc.

A commodity is tradeable against a general equivalent, ie, money. "Exchanging" love for love is not trading it - in fact, it is even not really "exchanging" anything. If I love Mary, Mary maybe loves me too, and I will be glad with that; but if Mary happens to not love me, my love remains until it extinguishes itself. I can't stop "producing" it because it has no market.

Also love is untransferable. A piece of bread can be sold to Mary or to Jane, as long as they want it. Even services are like that - the barber will shave John or Harry, depending of which of them comes first to the parlour. But it is impossible to love Jane instead of Mary just because she shows up first, or has more to offer in exchange for it.


Commodity in the Marxist sense of the word by the way.

I know that vulgar "libertarians" trying to make the market a natural expression of humanity have come with similar ideas - that expression of human feelings is "traded" for the expression of similar feelings. But it is not marxist in the least, much on the contrary.

Luís Henrique

[MarxSchmarx]

you cannot decide "today I am going to love Mary" and then produce love for Mary as a result of your decision.


Ever heard of the Virgin of Guadalupe?

LH it seems "love" is manufactured all the time by capitalists, e.g. "love of country", "I love this song", and, yes, even "love" for a car, a pet, or a harlot. How is the love we feel for brother or our significant other so different than these commercial concoctions? It seems to me it is a matter of degree, not of substance.

[Luís Henrique]

Originally posted by [email protected] 13, 2007 05:52 am
LH it seems "love" is manufactured all the time by capitalists, e.g. "love of country", "I love this song", and, yes, even "love" for a car, a pet, or a harlot.


I don't think the word here is "manufactured".

And they certainly don't sell "love of country" to the masses; on the contrary, it is distributed freely.

Luís Henrique

[Raúl Duke]

Aren't commodities given subjective characteristics so they become something more than they really are? (Isn't it called reifeication, or commodity fetishism, or etc?)

IS love a subjective characteristic to some of these commodities?

???

[Digitalis]

Love is a chemical reaction in the brain, not a thing to be bought and sold.

[Tatarin]

I can't see how love could be one. If implying just the sex, then that isn't really love in a sence.

However, maybe it could be in a nightmarish capitalist future in where human brains can be technologically or biologically manipulated into loving a rich businessman...

[JazzRemington]

I know this thread is dead, but I'm rereading Das Kapital vol. 1 and I found this quote:


Originally posted by Das [email protected] vol. 1, pt. 1, ch. 3
Objects that in themselves are no commodities, such as conscience, honour, &c., are capable of being offered for sale by their holders, and of thus acquiring, through their price, the form of commodities. Hence an object may have a price without having value. The price in that case is imaginary, like certain quantities in mathematics. On the other hand, the imaginary price-form may sometimes conceal either a direct or indirect real value-relation; for instance, the price of uncultivated land, which is without value, because no human labour has been incorporated in it.