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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   15358 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 21, 2025

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Whether or not they will be exchanged for money or handed out for free, nobody wants those widgets. They are useless crap. They are worthless.

That would mean the corresponding labor was not "socially necessary" labor time. Marx was trying to avoid getting down into supply & demand fluctuations, to mainly make a more core scientific approach to investigating where value/profit comes from. But that "socially necessary" term is where he had to bundle it in anyway.

Hm then where do you draw the line? What if the widgets just suck but aren't totally useless?

Yeah I think it's just backward-looking in his conception. To the extent it was profitable at all, then that's the extent that the labor turned out to have been 'socially necessary'. So it's supply & demand after all.

I think it basically works as a way to think of where the profit value comes from: putting together inputs and selling the output for more money, thus you got more 'use-value' out of the inputs than you paid for their 'exchange-value'. But I agree with others that there's no reason for Marx to have said that only labor can have a use-value greater than their fair exchange-value (apparently he just switched on a dime while writing Capital and declared that, in order to make the theory of value into a classical labor theory of value, and then got tied in knots trying to justify that declaration).

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