DJP
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“I’m afraid the above statement reflects your inability to make a distinction between collection & creation.”
All human labour (production) can do is transform materials provided by nature from one form into another. The production of raw materials could involve something as simple as finding and collecting them. But the finding and gathering of these raw materials has transformed them – they are now in a form which can be used by people.
To return to the pearl example – an ungathered pearl inside a clam cannot (yet) be used by anyone (they are not “use values” in Marx’s terminology). A pile of pearls removed from the clams and returned to the bay can be used (they are now “use values”), their form has been changed by labour. As someone will want these pearls, and as we live in a market economy, the pearls will fetch a price (they have an “exchange value”) and this price is a reflection of the value that they contain (the amount of socially necessary average labour it takes to find them and bring them to shore).
So nature creates the pearls, but collecting them and bringing them to shore changes their form, and it is this act of production that gives them a “value” (in an exchange economy).
Does this make sense to you?
“My answer is, ‘Yes!’”
Well this is not what Marx says. Read the first few chapters of Capital.
A useful thing produced by human labour is only a commodity under specific historical circumstances. This is not an unimportant point.
Of course you don’t have to agree with what is written by Marx, but the beginning point of being able to criticise any theory is knowing what it’s basic categories are. With regards to Marx you have not done this.
“I know oxygen in free air, rain water, uncaught fishes in seas, etc. so many useful things that don’t belong to the category of commodities.”
Ok. Do you think that every useful thing produced by human labour is a commodity?
“Pearl divers that dive into seas for pearls do not produce pearl balls. They discover & collect pearls, and thus they add value to collected pearls which thus turn commodities.”
The claim isn’t that pearl divers are able to grow pearls from their own bodies or magically make them appear out of thin air. “Producing” a natural pearl is the act of diving into the sea, finding pearls and bringing them back to shore. As pearls are multiple this is an act that can be “reproduced”.
As ALB said it’s a case of “humans transforming materials that originally came from (the rest of) nature into something useful for them.” Pearls inside of an oyster at the bottom of the sea are not useful. They become useful through the act of being fished (or whatever the term is for the gathering of pearls). That is what it means to “produce” a natural pearl.
“Even the Guardian is surprised by pro-war anarchists protecting Ukraine”
Perhaps those anarchists should have read that Makhno book instead of photographing the cover of it.
“The history of recent years will afford considerable weight to their argument, for the Ukraine has seen a parade of all manner of authorities and, when all is said and done, these have been as indistinguishable one from another as peas in a pod. We must demonstrate that a “blow-in” State power and an “independent” State power amount to just about equal in value and that the toilers have nothing to gain from either: they should focus all their attention elsewhere: on destroying the nests of the State apparatus and replacing these with worker and peasant bodies for social and economic self-direction.” https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/makhno-nestor/works/1928/12/national-question.htm
“Would like to know your logic for your refusal to consider ‘works of art’ to be commodities.”
1. A commodity is a useful thing produced for the purpose of exchange.
2. The value (but not the actual price that it sells for) of a commodity is determined by the amount of average socially necessary labour time necessary to reproduce it.
3. “Price” is the amount of money that something exchanges for on the market.
Works of art are not produced for the purpose of exchange. (You could argue against this definition. But here I am making a distinction between art and crafts)
A work of art (for example the original painting of Picasso’s “Guernica”) cannot have value because it is not a reproducable thing. As there can only ever be one original work it couldn’t have a value determined by average socially necessary labour time either. To have an average you need at least two things.
Despite the two points above, “Guernica” could be sold – current estimates place it’s price in the region $200 million. But this price is determined solely by what the market can bear. It has nothing to do with “value” in the sense of SNLT.
If we are talking about prints of “Guernica” we can talk about these being commodities, as they are reproducable, are produced for exchange and therefore have value.
“Producers (wage workers) in a factory do not produce useful things ‘for the purpose of exchange[ing]’ them really. Still, the useful things they produce are all commodities.”
Of course, the workers in a factory are not the people selling the goods. But the whole fact of them being there depends on the aim of the product being sold so as to be transformed into money.
“Evidently, if, to be a commodity, ‘a useful thing’ has to be dependent on its producer’s intention to exchange it for something else, it’d be impossible to find a commodity in mountainous heaps of industrial products under capitalism, I’m afraid to say.”
So you think all useful things are commodities? That’s definitely not what’s written in the first couple of chapters of Capital.
Prakash wrote: “I make a distinction between value and market-value. No value means no market-value, hence no market-price.”
Aren’t you actually saying here that “value” and price (is this what you mean by market-value?) are the same thing, not different? How do you see what you call “value”, “market-value” and “price” as being different?
Are you trying to understand Marx’s theory in Capital or are you trying to put forward a theory of your own?
Either way, you seem to be tripping yourself up by conflating “valuable” with “value”. “Value” in Marx’s sense relates to the amount of social necessary average labour time that it takes to produce a commodity. In Marx’s theory a commodity is not *just* a product of human labour. It’s a useful thing, produced by labour, that is produced for the purpose of exchange. Not everything that can be sold is a commodity – think about works of art, uncultivated land, honour etc – these things have a price but they do not have ‘value’ (in Marx’s sense) since they are not commodities.
ALB wrote; “Their political consciousness has not evolved beyond the view of those who vote for parties to form a government to do something for them.”
I think this highlights the contradictory nature of much “direct action” activism neatly. They make a fetish out of not pursuing parliamentary political action, yet their tactics are only concerned with influencing parliament. Reformism by the extra-parliamentary route.
“A reviewer had given it five stars and rated it excellent.”
You think all reviews are written by actual genuine people? That’s kind of cute. Fake, computer-generated reviews are a problem on these platforms.
Why would it be “more cost effective” to pay for a leaflet drop when there isn’t an election than when there is an election?
Because people wouldn’t be saturated with materials from political parties then, so the pamphlet (might) have more impact.
Obviously, my comments about standing in elections are just that, my tuppence worth. I was forgetting the difference in cost in local and national elections. But still wonder if continually standing in elections, and only getting a handful of votes, has a negative publicity effect.
If you stood as Mr Blobby you probably would have got more votes.
I wonder why you guys still think it’s worth contesting elections in the current climate? Surely there are better, and more cost effective ways of getting publicity? Like paying for a leaflet drop when there isn’t an election for example.
It’s the fact that we know of nothing valuable that happens to have no labour embedded in it that appears an incontestable argument for the law of value discovered by Marx.
This was not Marx’s argument. You seem to be confused about what Marx means by “value”. Plenty of things that we could not live without, and which are therefore highly valuable, are definitely not a product of human labour, air and sunlight for example.
Marx doesn’t argue that the “value” of an individual commodity = it’s “price” (not even in the long run), in fact it’s important for his theory that they do not. For Marx the “value” and “price” of a commodity are not the same thing. We cannot see the “value” of a commodity directly, only indirectly through it’s price. But other things influence price other than value and things that are not commodities can have prices too.
