The use value and exchange value of Capital depreciate at different rates. For instance, a reasonably used factory machine is nearly worthless and has virtually no resale value. Nobody wants it, yet it can still apparently transfer value to the products as long as its still running. It also still has use value.
Is this a contradiction in the LTV?
No? It just means that the use value remaining in the factory and its capital is below its exchange rate.
Finally a good critical question about the LTV that isn't some mudpie shit.
I might be wrong but I think this is related to how machinery is dead labour?
Is that actually true though? If so, an obvious reason could be that it's hard to tell whether the seller is telling the truth about how much it was used. But I'm pretty skeptical that it's true.
are you serious?
Certain pieces of capital have a resale value depreciation not proportion to their use value depreciation. I worded it poorly.
No, I understood what you were saying. My questions:
1. What evidence is there of this?
2. Isn't this just a result of distrust? The buyer can't be sure that the seller is right about the depreciation of his fixed capital. If this is the case, the price of partially-depreciated fixed capital would gravitate around the amortized value or average of all such instances of fixed capital on the used market, perhaps in brackets according to certain quality observations. IE, a lightly-used piece can sell at a loss, and an overused piece could sell at a profit.
3. I know for sure that plenty of used items are sold roughly at their depreciated value. But again, the value will frequently be based around averages. My perfectly good used Facebook machine is devalued by all the virus-ridden, cumstained boomerware that's on craigslist.
You won't find a single atom of value in a machine, because value is a social relation. If nobody wants it then whatever value it has simply cannot be realized. It's like a rotten banana, sure it embodies some quantity of socially necessary labour time, but that hardly matters because it will never be realized. It's still not a contradiction of the LTV because the LTV can only be debunked by showing that there is no proportionality between the statistical expected price of a commodity and the the statistical expected labour time required to produce it. The only commodity I am aware of where this relation does not hold is oil, but all you can say from is that the LTV doesn't hold for oil, as one outlier data point is not enough to disprove an observable pattern.
This reminds me of the 2017 case with the UPM paper mill in Vosges, France that was to be shut down. The employees and nearby townsfolk pooled cash together to buy the factory machines-and-all for themselves in a coming auction.
Guess what? UPM sabotaged all the machinery. Even a brand-new roller literally still in it's box and worth 700 000 euros had had holes drilled in it. Orders had come from above to render hundreds of millions of perfectly usable assets to a few millions worth of scrap metal to cut the legs off any potential competition. No more factory, no more employment, no more usable machines. Just vacant real-estate, decades of experience wasted, and polished scrap.
Needless to say, this incident still pisses me off.
Article:
graphiline.com
Translation (French->English):
translate.yandex.com
Value is a kind of energy or potential that moves commodities through social space, subsequently moving them in physical space. Value really is "in" the commodities as it dictates how they move and where they land. Marx is really explicit that the economy and all social relations are a material reality.
But it's already been depreciated. Have you read the sections on depreciation?
holeee fuck
literal grain burning kulaks
People still think kulak sabotage and similar incidents on a mass scale couldn't happen because of how irrational it seems but that really is what happens.
I'm pretty sure main reasons are different:
a) they've been told that it didn't happen
b) their views benefit from such incidents not happening
Given that most people don't even know much about history, their opinions can't be based on thinking things through and judging events improbable.
Literal Kulak sabotage… it reminds me of how in Russia today mixes ash with bread dough that is too old to sell for full price rather than just giving it away to the many starving people, or how a british company burns surplus umbrellas rather than selling them at half-price or giving them away.
What makes you say that?
From what I've heard oil is a statistical outlier commodity due to the demand being constantly super high (due to being the basis for industrial society as it stands), while also being a natural oligopoly (geographical limitations as to which countries can produce oil). The mean of the price of oil is therefore not proportional to the mean of the labour-time required to produce it. I believe it was briefly mentioned in one of dickpunch's videos (it being a statistical outlier, the 'why' is my own interpretation)
Value is only material in the sense that it is an emergent behaviour of a material system at the macro-level (i.e. across the human economy), not as a substance in an of itself. That's the point I'm trying to get across.
You should consider the problem more carefully. What is the use value of machine in our era? The real use of machine is to become capital, to generate profit, not to produce things. If it cannot generate profit (because of low productivity compare to new machine), then it has no use value.
As Marx pointed out in Capital, use value depends on historical process of production. What is the use value of modern petroleum in ancient age? Nothing, too hard to be used as fuel. But does that the objective ability to use petroleum as fuel disappear?
(cont.)
So only in socialist system, another use value of machine, that is to produce things, that is to help human in production process, could be realised. So in capitalist system, don't be surprised that the real use value of machine is to exploit people, no more, no less.
They are doing this because if they didn't do it it would start heightening the contradictions of capital by them being forced to drop prices in order to get their goods sold which will lead to a steady downward spiral in capitalist profits, just as Marx described it. Waste is literally built into capitalism for as long as the capitalists want to make any profit.
OP I’ve been trying to figure out what the fuck you’re trying to say for like 10 minutes now and I’ve still got nothing.
Price/“resale value”=/=value. Marx is extremely clear about the fact that there isn’t an absolutely determinative relationship between the two. A commodity’s price, the amount of dollars we pay in order to consume whatever commodity it is, is determined by a multitude of factors (monopolization/artificial price inflation by firms/etc.). There is nothing guaranteeing that a commodity is sold at its value, in fact, an individual firm can sell a commodity at twice its “real social value” (designer brands do this sort of thing with clothes all the time) but that price doesn’t have anything to do with the value of the commodity in aggregate/socially speaking. Rather, prices set by capitalists tend to trail behind value because they have to sell on the market alongside other firms at the same historical moment with the same productive technologies available to them. That’s why, although as stated above price=/=value, prices are in aggregate usually close to value. You can sell something for whatever you want, but b/c no one’s going to buy your $3000 basketball (barring some contingent factor), that’s probably not what you’ll sell it for.
Value is a socio-historical category relating to production, which means that it can only be “measured” in aggregate, i.e. relative to the historical conditions of technological innovation and its impact on the AVERAGE amount of time it takes to make the commodities in question. Computers haven’t gotten cheaper/more available in the last several decades because capitalists just decided to start charging less for them, revolutions in productive technologies made the productive process faster, which lowered the value of computers [i]en masse.[/i] This was due to objective historical developments, and NOT pricing by select firms.
1/2
Where did you get the idea that value has anything to do with whether or not a commodity is desired by someone? As long as a machine is used in the process of commodity production (assuming no contingent factors e.g. damaged products due to machine defects) it imbues the commodities it produces with a constant quantity of value until the machine is removed from the production process. Machines are removed from production if they either break (i.e. they aren’t able to transfer their value to commodities anymore) or become outdated (I.e. technological innovation produces machines which lower the value of whatever particular commodity by quickening the labor process, causing firms with the old machinery to lose their ability to compete w/ the now cheaper commodities produced by the firms w/ new machines). Barring these two situations, capitalists have no reason to remove a machine from commodity production/the valorisation process. Assuming a machine’s degree of “usage” isn’t causing an observable degradation in its ability to produce at a constant rate, this “usage” means literally nothing about that machine’s value.
I’m short, no you have not discovered a contradiction in Marx’s theory, you’ve just misunderstood it.
This entire post makes me want to die.
Well what the fuck. So is value a social relation or is it something essential which can or cannot be “realized?” Do you see the contradiction here?
Value is historically specific to the labor process of capitalist society and applies only to elements of the reproduction and circulation within that social totality, it’s not something which may or may not be “realized” based on particular desires. What you actually just described is in fact use value, but b/c you tossed in something about social relations, you think you’re describing value.
Value is above all a category of production, in as much as value is congealed labor time. What is “social” about this is the social nature of proletarian labor insofar as it is a historically specific organization of human time and activity unique to the capitalist social form. Value is a social relationship NOT because it’s only “realizable” if other humans want a particular commodity, it’s social character is derived from the human actions in which are constantly working to reproduce value, i.e. the human capacity for labor which is sold for a wage.
My point with all of this is to point out that your “explanation” here is a total mystification of what LTV is all about. It’s about capitalist society and its production process centered around proletarian labor, NOT a transhistorical metric to find out what things are “worth”
not true, image is part of the commodity and is very expensive
not him but:
product of human labour, without being 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.) Lastly nothing can have value, without being an object of utility. If the thing is
useless, so is the labour contained in it; the labour does not count as labour, and therefore creates no value.
One of the condition to have value is to have use value, without use value, then the labour spent doesn't count as labour. He is somewhat right.