Question about Value?

[Jacob Cliff]

Is true that all trade is mutually beneficial? An individual purchases things because he values a certain commodity over his own; is there such thing as intrinsic value? If so, what proves this?

I may sound all over the place, but I don't realy get how the amount of labor that goes into a commodity makes it more valuable. Isn't that just subjective? Please refute this with as little rhetoric heavy rebuttals as you can. When Marxists say value, do they mean the cost of production?

[Blake's Baby]

The search function isn't working for me unfortunately which makes pointing you towards alreay-elaborated answers a bit more tricky, but there are dozens, if not hundreds, of threads about this topic already. Here are a couple I took part in (I hope in a cleaar way) in the last few days: http://www.revleft.com/vb/wage-labor...30#post2801730 and http://www.revleft.com/vb/writing-ma...24#post2801024 EDIT: wasn't one of these your thread? Obviously my explanation isn't all that clear otherwise you wouln't be asking the same questions 5 days later in a different thread.

What's difficult about this? I don't understand what you're not getting. But I'll take your questions in order.

1 - no, who says all trade is mutually beneficial?
2 - what do you mean by 'intrinsic' value? If something is no conceivable use to me, I won't buy it, no matter how much others might value it, no matter how much work has gone into it etc.
3 - no the amount of labour in something isn't subjective, how could it be? But, Marx doesn't say that 'the amount of labour' in something makes it more valuable, he applies two conditions to this; firstly, the commodity must have a use, which implies a user, which means essentially a buyer - I can spend years making mud-pies but that doesn't mean they're valuable, because no-one wants them (they don't have an end use/user/buyer), and Marx specifically addresses this 'counter-argument' to labour-theories (meaning that anyone who brings it up hasn't actually read Marx and is criticising a strawman); secondly, what Marx talks about is socially-necessary labour-time - if we need a thousand chairs and 900 of those are machine-made in factories and take an hour each to make, and 100 of them are made by craftspeople in small workshops and take 50 hours each, the total time to make the 1000 chairs is 5900 hours. The average time to make one chair is 5.9 hours. The fact that it takes eight-and-a-half times longer to hand-make a chair doesn't make the hand-made chairs 8.5 times more 'valuable', because it's not actually necessary to spend 50 hours making a chair.
4 - no, 'value' is not identical to 'cost of production'.

[Jacob Cliff]

What usually happens is Austrians say "The Labor Theory of Value is wrong b/c value is entirely sibjective and you can't measure value or labor objectively. The theory implies intrinsic value and you can't prove that."

[DOOM]

What usually happens is Austrians say "The Labor Theory of Value is wrong b/c value is entirely sibjective and you can't measure value or labor objectively. The theory implies intrinsic value and you can't prove that."

Austrians imply that communists claim the LTV is some sort of dogma, a scientific approach towards a "better" economy. Marx however never claimed that the LTV is a rational and perfect concept, he just wanted to point out under which laws capitalism is working and critique them.

But this is not in any way a defect of the theory of value, but merely highlights the unconscious nature of these mediations. Marx, however, never attempted to propose a positive theory that could be in any way used as an instrument of economic policy. His concern, rather, was to demonstrate the irrationality, the inner contradictions, and hence the ultimate untenability of a society based on value. At its core, his theory of value is a critique of value — it is no accident then that his magnum opus is subtitled Critique of Political Economy — and, at the same time, essentially a theory of crisis.

http://www.mediationsjournal.org/art...lue-and-crisis

The claim that value is not measurable is just positivist bullshit.

[Red Star Rising]

Is true that all trade is mutually beneficial? An individual purchases things because he values a certain commodity over his own; is there such thing as intrinsic value? If so, what proves this?

I may sound all over the place, but I don't realy get how the amount of labor that goes into a commodity makes it more valuable. Isn't that just subjective? Please refute this with as little rhetoric heavy rebuttals as you can. When Marxists say value, do they mean the cost of production?

Absolutely not, that is partly the crux of Marxist theory - surplus value. As Marx spends too many damn pages going over in Volume 1 of Capital, the process of capital (value in motion) for a capitalist is M-C-M (Money --> Commodity --> Money+more money). This process would be pointless if trade was mutually beneficial so he ends up selling the commodity he initially bought for more. Someone has too lose. And if we apply this to commodity production: M-L-C-M (where L is human labour power), there is a trade between the worker and the owner of the means of production. This is not an equal trade as the commodities produced are sold for more than the worker is paid. Therefore the bourgeoisie extract more from this exchange than they give back. So no, it is not mutually beneficial, and pointless in capitalism when it is.

[Thirsty Crow]

Is true that all trade is mutually beneficial? An individual purchases things because he values a certain commodity over his own; is there such thing as intrinsic value? If so, what proves this?

I may sound all over the place, but I don't realy get how the amount of labor that goes into a commodity makes it more valuable. Isn't that just subjective? Please refute this with as little rhetoric heavy rebuttals as you can. When Marxists say value, do they mean the cost of production?

It is subjective but it is what the interpersonal consensus governing exchange amounts to - an agreed, if unwillingly, standard or criterion. It can be no other than "subjective" since it is decidedly not dictated by some mysterious laws of nature.

[cyu]

Is true that all trade is mutually beneficial?

Is extortion mutually beneficial? I get your wallet, you get to live. Clearly a win-win situation for both of us, right?



Is there really violence inherent in the system? Yes. All property claims are enforced by violence. If a hungry man attempts to eat bread that he does not "own" then pro-capitalists will use violence againt him.

It is the role of the ruling class to define "peace" as whatever supports their rule. And if they use violence to defend their power, they attempt to mislead the ruled into believing that what they do is not violence, but is rather "upholding the peace".

[Comrade #138672]

Is true that all trade is mutually beneficial?

No.

An individual purchases things because he values a certain commodity over his own; is there such thing as intrinsic value? If so, what proves this?

I may sound all over the place, but I don't realy get how the amount of labor that goes into a commodity makes it more valuable. Isn't that just subjective? Please refute this with as little rhetoric heavy rebuttals as you can. When Marxists say value, do they mean the cost of production?

Let us first distinguish between exchange-value and use-value, or utility, if you will. Personally I prefer value instead of exchange-value, and utility instead of use-value, but that is a matter of personal taste.

Anyway, utility is inherently subjective, while value is objective. What is useful to me, is not necessarily useful to you. However, when it comes to value, my subjective view of the value of a commodity does nothing to its value. Value is determined by the objective social relations shaped by the capitalist mode of production. The value of a commodity is essentially nothing more than the average labor-time required to reproduce the commodity. The average labor-time required to reproduce the commodity is dependent on the development of the means of production of society, i.e., of the aggregate of social relations.

So, you can now easily see why value is necessarily objective. Bourgeois proponents of the marginalist theory of value confuse value and utility, and treat it as one and the same. This is rightly rejected by Marxism. The liberal ideology of marginalists prevents them from seeing the obvious.