historical value?
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A question about value theory
What gives age old things, such as say, an old bottle or a megalodon tooth, value?
How are these things' values determined? Is it by the amount of labor put into finding them? Or what if these were easily found? What if a megalodon tooth is perfectly preserved and is worth upwards of $10,000, but it was simply lying on a beach an didn't require any real labor in order to acquire it?
historical value?
Of course,it's value is determined by a labor wich was necessary to find it. The money wich a museum pays you for your find is it's price.
Any anti-communist is a dog. - Jean-Paul Sartre.
Old things like antiques and the remains of ancient beings tend to be scarce and therefore difficult to find because the more time goes by, the less likely they are to be preserved. Sometimes people get lucky and come into possession of valuable objects without making much effort. You might be like Jed Clampett from Beverly Hillbillies and stumble across crude oil bubblin' in the backyard, but your lack of real effort wouldn't make it any less valuable because the value is determined by the socially average necessary labor time to attain the commodity. So even if you are lucky and find a megalodon tooth on the beach without any real effort, other people could spend their whole lives searching for one and never find it. In the end, the labor time spent in search of the thing averages out, with rarer objects generally costing more time and effort to come across.
The Marxist (as well as Ricardo, Smith, Mills, etc.) labor theory of value is based on commodity production, not on rarities or ancient bottles of wine. A commodity is something which is mass produced and reproduced only for sale and profit.
Marx described two kinds of value, use and exchange. Use is whatever utility something has for a person, whether from the "stomach or from fancy." (Capital, Ch One.) The old bottle of wine or the tooth of a dinosaur has a utility of fancy. It's price is whatever somebody wants to pay for it. Exchange value, on the other hand, is the amount of commodities which can be exchanged for another commodity. The dinosaur tooth is useful for possession by some people, but it is not a commodity. It wasn't produced for the sole purpose of being sold.
Marx titled chapter one of Capital '"Use-Value and Value", i think in order to distinguish commodity value from use value.
So, the discussion of the labor theory of value only relates to exchange value; however, it is also true, as Marx noted, that something cannot be a commodity without being useful.
A commodity is something produced by social labor, it is that which gives it value. An apple found in a forest has use-value. An apple produced in a gigantic agro farm with thousands of workers and huge machinery is a commodity. A fossilized apple found in Montana is useful, but it is not a commodity.
The idea of the labor theory of value, which goes back to Aristotle, was totally rejected by mainstream capitalist economics in the mid 19th century. And why? Because Karl Marx showed how capitalists got rich from it. And that is something they can never admit.
That seems to imply that people all over the planet are spending their time looking for mastodon teeth. I think the real question is whether the mastodon tooth is a commodity in the first place. It's possible you could put the tooth up for auction at Christie's and some mastodon tooth fanatic would buy it. But that would not give it value, it would have use-value for the fanatic, however.
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What if you just found it laying on the ground?
It seems to me that this kind of question implies that the value of a megalodon tooth is determined in the same way as a tube of toothpaste. When you say that the toothpaste value is based on paid and unpaid labor, then the anti-Marxists respond by asking what is the value of the dinosoaur tooth if no labor was used to find it. The megalodon tooth might sell at auction for $100k, but the toothpaste sells for $2.95. So, according to them the labor theory of value is disproved. But this is true only if the dinosaur tooth is a commodity, a good or service mass produced by human beings only for the purpose of being sold, and are "fungible across the market" , i.e. one tube of toothpaste is basically indistinguishable from another.
"Value" in the economic sense applies only to commodities.
Commodities don't have to be mass produced. A commodity is just anything that you can trade for something else. Also a commodity does not necessarily form part of commodity capital. (If I sell you a jar of my toe nail clippings for $5, and then I use the money you paid me to buy hot dogs for myself, it's not capital but it is still a commodity, and if I use a nail file on my toes during the rest of my life, the clippings are definitely not mass produced). The "extractive industries", like mining, do require labor. Gold has traditionally been the commodity which functions as money, partly because it is rare. If tree leaves were used as money, well then that would kind of defeat the purpose. You could go on a hike and find a bunch of gold in a cave and become rich, but this is extremely unlikely so again it is the socially average labor time.
And there is a market for dinosaur fossils.
[QUOTE=Lacrimi de Chiciură;2884213]Commodities don't have to be mass produced.
A commodity is just anything that you can trade for something else. Also a commodity does not necessarily form part of commodity capital. (If I sell you a jar of my toe nail clippings for $5, and then I use the money you paid me to buy hot dogs for myself, it's not capital but it is still a commodity, and if I use a nail file on my toes during the rest of my life, the clippings are definitely not mass produced).
The "extractive industries", like mining, do require labor. Gold has traditionally been the commodity which functions as money, partly because it is rare. If tree leaves were used as money, well then that would kind of defeat the purpose. You could go on a hike and find a bunch of gold in a cave and become rich, but this is extremely unlikely so again it is the socially average labor time.
And there is a market for dinosaur fossils.
There has to be commodities before there can be accumulation of commodities.
Why do you consider tomatoes sold for $5 a commodity but not toe nail clippings, if they are sold? Take another example: human hair. When a person goes to the barber to get a haircut and the hair is swept up and thrown away, that (the removed hair) is not a commodity, but it becomes a commodity if it is sold to a wig-manufacturing firm, where it also functions as raw material in the production of another commodity: the wig. It (the hair) would still be a commodity even if the wig-manufacturer is a bald proletarian who buys the hair of another proletarian because he just wants to make a single wig for himself, although in this case the wig would not be a commodity. Exchanging one useful thing for another useful thing means that both are commodities. Commodities predate capitalism, as merchant capital predates industrial capitalism.
Gold does not have to be "produced" though, which is the premise of this thread. A couple years ago, a guy in Scotland found a naturally-formed gold nugget in a river after looking for "a few minutes". Of course, he was lucky. If gold nuggets were more plentiful, and everyone could appropriate them from nature with the same small amount of effort as that man, gold nuggets would not be so valued because the socially average necessary labor time to appropriate them would be smaller. The same principle goes for dinosaur fossils or any other extinct species remains. Saying that gold can be a commodity but that dinosaur fossils can't is just arbitrary.
Last edited by Lacrimi de Chiciură; 26th June 2017 at 11:34.
Um, which river?
x D
The term you're indicating is 'reserve currency', meaning any set *standard* for the abstract storage of monetary valuations -- gold happens to be aesthetically pleasing and also *durable*, so we can chalk that one up to *qualitative* characteristics. (It's surpassed, though, by fiat currency which can be governmentally *regulated* and doesn't suffer from a lock-in of relatively finite gold *quantity*, leading inexorably to *deflation*.) (Ever-increasing total valuations over time being represented by a stagnating total amount of currency.)
Also the socially-agreed-upon currency doesn't *have* to be a rare item:
And:
The 10 strangest things that have been used as money around the world
http://www.businessinsider.com/alter...urrency-2016-4
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*These* days -- since the Industrial Revolution -- I think we're most-commonly referring to *mass-produced* items as 'commodities' because that's what most people have access to and are interested-in for an everyday-type context. It's also what's at-stake for our revolutionary politics since mass production has the potential to truly cater to the entire world's population, under collective workers' control.
[QUOTE=Lacrimi de Chiciură;2884269]There has to be commodities before there can be accumulation of commodities.
Why do you consider tomatoes sold for $5 a commodity but not toe nail clippings, if they are sold? Take another example: human hair. When a person goes to the barber to get a haircut and the hair is swept up and thrown away, that (the removed hair) is not a commodity, but it becomes a commodity if it is sold to a wig-manufacturing firm, where it also functions as raw material in the production of another commodity: the wig. It (the hair) would still be a commodity even if the wig-manufacturer is a bald proletarian who buys the hair of another proletarian because he just wants to make a single wig for himself, although in this case the wig would not be a commodity. Exchanging one useful thing for another useful thing means that both are commodities. Commodities predate capitalism, as merchant capital predates industrial capitalism.
Gold does not have to be "produced" though, which is the premise of this thread. A couple years ago, a guy in Scotland found a naturally-formed gold nugget in a river after looking for "a few minutes". Of course, he was lucky. If gold nuggets were more plentiful, and everyone could appropriate them from nature with the same small amount of effort as that man, gold nuggets would not be so valued because the socially average necessary labor time to appropriate them would be smaller. The same principle goes for dinosaur fossils or any other extinct species remains. Saying that gold can be a commodity but that dinosaur fossils can't is just arbitrary.
Capital does derive from commodity exchange, but not all commodities constitute commodity capital (the form of capital in its circulation between productive and money capitals). However monopolistic capitalism has become, there are still plenty of commonplace examples of non-capitalist commodity exchange (i.e., between proletarians) in everyday late capitalism. In America, some parents pay their children to mow the lawn of the family home. This act alone does not make the parents capitalists. Selling your friend a copy of a book that you finished reading, it doesn't make you a capitalist. If you give money or a loaf of bread to a busker in exchange for playing your favorite song, neither of you need necessarily be capitalists for this to happen. Two kids trading their lunches with each other at school are not capitalists. Arranging with someone on a website like craigslist to sell your motorcycle or whatever commodity does not transform you into a capitalist.Originally Posted by RedMaterialist
RedMaterialist, you are, to my mind, turning the question of what commodification objectively is into a question of the ethics and morality of particular forms of commodification. Commodification is still commodification indifferent of whether it violates whatever ethical standards anyone has, whether it is illegal and happening on black markets or aboveboard, sanctioned by the bourgeois state, whether or not you can comprehend how another person can see utility in what seems useless to you. Human beings, parts of human beings, trees, wild animals, public property, sex, even murder (think of the hit-men and mercenaries hired by Coca Cola in Colombia): all these things have been and continue to be treated as commodities and incorporated into the exploitation process under capitalism. Recognizing this does not mean giving the exploiters "a logical curtain to hide behind". I think that not recognizing it for what it is would do a much greater disservice to our critical analysis of capitalism.
The example of the gold nugget discovered after a few minutes of effort is only to illustrate that the labor theory of value still functions, because the amount of work contained in the "products" of extractive industries (which do not "produce" things per se, but appropriate the products of nature), is determined on the basis of the "socially average labor time". The man's gold nugget is not worth less than another person's gold nugget simply because he found his in a few minutes and the other person had to sweat for thousands of hours to find the same amount of gold.
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Interesting example, but I would imagine that if most cowries were being extracted from the Indian Ocean, it would not have been all that easy to come across them in the interiors of West Africa or China. This neat website claims that , "The cowries were an intelligent solution to make "small money" because they were collected in seas far south of China and only kings could afford to import them."Originally Posted by ckaihatsu
Simple answer - Its rarity makes it valuable among collectors. That's it. Thats why Pawn stars exists. Nothing to do with "labour" or "work value". Different category people.
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The megaladon tooth would also have scientific value, if we unlock its secrets we could cure lung cancer... or something
Well, I certainly can agree with that, it's the capitalists who would deny that selling human beings is a commodity exchange. Marx was clear that his analysis of commodity production and exchange was only an economic analysis and had nothing to do with morality.
But that leaves the question of what is a commodity. You are saying that anything being exchanged between two people is a commodity, including two kids trading lunches. Their mothers bought the two lunches at a WalMart which produces and sells millions of the damn things everyday. The difference, I think, is that neither of the two kids makes a profit off the exchange, although both may benefit from the exchange. Walmart makes a small profit from the sale of the lunches and multiplied millions of times results in a massive profit for the Walton family. Their mothers made the sandwiches? It doesn't matter. They had to buy the bread, ham, etc. from, in our society, a global capitalist.
Walmart's profit comes from the low wages it pays to its employees, suppliers, packaging, etc.
You said finding a nugget of gold does not make you a capitalist. Yet you admit that the nugget's value is based on the social labor of workers around the world who are producing gold. The nugget may be worth $1,000, but the average worker is only paid a few dollars for their work. The difference is appropriated by the gold capitalist. Aren't you doing the same thing? The nugget cost you nothing, but because of the unpaid labor of millions of workers you can walk into a pawn shop and come out with a $1,000.
Nobody expects you to donate the nugget to a labor union (although you might send a few bucks to RevLeft.)
I think my point is that neither the school lunches nor the found nugget are commodities. Here is Marx and Engel's definition of a commodity:
" Whoever directly satisfies his wants with the produce of his own labour, creates, indeed, use values, but not commodities. In order to produce the latter, he must not only produce use values, but use values for others, social use values. (And not only for others, without more. The mediaeval peasant produced quit-rent-corn for his feudal lord and tithe-corn for his parson. But neither the quit-rent-corn nor the tithe-corn became commodities by reason of the fact that they had been produced for others. To become a commodity a product must be transferred to another, whom it will serve as a use value, by means of an exchange.)[12]"
A commodity has to be a product of labor and it must be transferred to another by means of an exchange. You merely found the nugget.
Suppose you found the Hope diamond in a cave, or a Picasso in a cave, or a satchel with $100k in a cave, or a hundred pounds of rubies in a cave, or an 1850 bottle of French wine in a cave, or an uncashed ticket for a 1,000-1 shot in the Kentucky Derby in a cave, or the formula for the fountain of youth in a cave. They can all be exchanged for money, so they all have value and you expended no labor in getting them. So they are all commodities?
One kid's lunch could consist of vegetables grown in a home or community garden. But even if the lunches both come from Walmart, it's just another step in a series of commodity exchanges. Otherwise, let's say that, as a hobby, you make arts & craft type products using raw materials (clay, paint, canvas, beads, string, etc.) purchased from Walmart, and you intend to sell these products yourself at a price which only covers the cost of the raw materials purchased. Are your products not commodities simply because they were supplied by Walmart? Or because they don't make a profit?
Unless you use the money you made from the sale of the gold to cover startup costs of founding your own business or invest in stocks, making you the owner of a self-valorizing capital, you don't become a capitalist. If you quit your job and use the money to cover your own cost of living for a year, after your money stash runs out you will have to stop vegging out and sell your labor again. You have not become a capitalist.
One time I saw one of those huge packages of paper towel rolls sitting at a bus stop, near a big-box store. Nobody was around, so I suppose someone must have forgotten it there after doing their shopping. Do the paper towels stop being a commodity simply because they are outside the store and there's nothing to stop you from taking them, knowing that their rightful owner will probably not bother to make the commute back across the city just for some paper towels? Did the towels not already become a commodity when they were exchanged to someone else for money? I think in this case the potential for exchange (you could take the paper towels and put them up for sale yourself) is enough to say that they remain a commodity. Or if they stop being a commodity after their sale from the store, then are they only retroactively considered as a commodity for the period of time preceding the sale? (Since the useful product does not become a commodity until it is transferred via exchange). In that case you would have to admit that things are never actually presently existing as commodities--they are just retroactively considered as commodities after being sold and they cease to be commodities after the transaction is over--which seems like a strange idea.
The paper towels do not lose their value only because you got them for free, because they are still the materialized product of labor, but you would not be exploiting the Walmart employees or the paper-towel factory workers if you made a couple bucks by pawning off the paper towels in this case. The commodity has already been alienated from them and further exchange of the towels doesn't impact them, anymore than the kids trading their lunches impacts them.
Similarly, if one paper towel factory is more productive than another one and makes 100 rolls of paper towels in the same amount of time that the second paper towel factory only makes 25 rolls, the owner of the first factory is not exploiting the workers of the second one by having discovered a method of producing a paper towel roll at a reduced cost. That's why I think if you find a gold nugget and sell it for $1000, it doesn't mean that you are yourself exploiting all of the world's gold miners.
Last edited by Lacrimi de Chiciură; 27th June 2017 at 09:48.
Originally Posted by Lacrimi de Chiciură=2884269
Interesting reply, but all you're doing is shifting the geographic context -- cowries were most abundant in the Indian Ocean, according to Wikipedia, and not so much in China, according to your source. You're not saying much here.
I'll just leave this here....
Cancer (General) - Rife Frequencies
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sL2VBxyv5Jw
https://youtube.com/user/newtimer5
Cowries were used as money in places like China and West Africa, where they were rare, because they had to be imported from the Indian Ocean, at a time when there were no planes, railroads, or cars.
Saying cowries weren't rare in the societies that used them as money is like saying gold was not rare to the 16th century Spanish because in Muisca/Chibcha culture (where the legend of El Dorado comes from), there was enough gold laying around that they literally made a habit of stylishly throwing it away (into Lake Guatavita).
Again, interesting, and I don't dispute your *empirical* (historical) statements, but if you're attempting to dispute *my* assertion that:
...Then you're not really doing it, because all I have to do is point to the region / population *of* the Indian Ocean, regarding the cowry shell, where:
(Post #11.)
